Irvine Welsh has 15 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 22 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 50 ratings. The most-rated is Dead Men's Trousers.
Dead Men's Trousers
Summary
Random House presents the audiobook edition of Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh, read by Tam Dean Burn. Mark Renton is finally a success. An international jet-setter, he now makes significant money managing DJs, but the constant travel, airport lounges, soulless hotel rooms and broken relationships have left him dissatisfied with his life. He's then rocked by a chance encounter with Frank Begbie, from whom he'd been hiding for years after a terrible betrayal and the resulting debt. But the psychotic Begbie appears to have reinvented himself as a celebrated artist and - much to Mark's astonishment - doesn't seem interested in revenge. Sick Boy and Spud, who have agendas of their own, are intrigued to learn that their old friends are back in town, but when they enter the bleak world of organ harvesting, things start to go so badly wrong. Lurching from crisis to crisis, the four men circle each other, driven by their personal histories and addictions, confused, angry - so desperate that even Hibs winning the Scottish Cup doesn't really help. One of these four will not survive to the end of this audiobook. Which one of them is wearing Dead Men's Trousers? Fast and furious, scabrously funny and weirdly moving, this is a spectacular return of the crew from Trainspotting.
©2018 Irvine Welsh (P)2018 Random House Audiobooks
The Blade Artist
Summary
Reprising the same powerfully perceptive writing style that made Trainspotting such a hit, Irvine Welsh delivers another successful blow with The Blade Artist. Graphic and shameless, it's complemented by Tam Dean Burn's skillful performance. Jim Francis has finally found the perfect life - and is now unrecognisable, even to himself. A successful painter and sculptor, he lives quietly with his wife, Melanie, and their two young daughters in an affluent beach town in California. Some say he's a fake and a con man while others see him as a genuine visionary. But Francis has a very dark past, with another identity and a very different set of values. When he crosses the Atlantic to his native Scotland for the funeral of a murdered son he barely knew, his old Edinburgh community expects him to take bloody revenge. But as he confronts his previous life, all those friends and enemies - and, most alarmingly, his former self - Francis seems to have other ideas. When Melanie discovers something gruesome in California that indicates her husband's violent past might also be his psychotic present, things start to go very bad very quickly. The Blade Artist is an elegant, electrifying novel - ultraviolent but curiously redemptive - and it marks the return of one of modern fiction's most infamous, terrifying characters: the incendiary Francis Begbie from Trainspotting.
©2016 Irvine Welsh (P)2016 Random House Audiobooks
Trainspotting
Summary
Choose us. Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing f****n junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total f***n embarrassment tae the selfish, f****d-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.
©1993 Irvine Welsh (P)2012 Random House AudioGo
Skagboys
Summary
Mark Renton has it all: He's good-looking, young, with a pretty girlfriend and a place at university. But there's no room for him in the 1980s.Thatcher's government is destroying working-class communities across Britain, and the post-war certainties of full employment, educational opportunity and a welfare state are gone. When his family starts to fracture, Mark's life swings out of control and he succumbs to the defeatism which has taken hold in Edinburgh's grimmer areas. The way out is heroin. It's no better for his friends. Spud Murphy is laid off from his job, Tommy Lawrence feels himself being sucked into a life of petty crime and violence - the worlds of the thieving Matty Connell and psychotic Franco Begbie. Only Sick Boy, the supreme manipulator of the opposite sex, seems to ride the current, scamming and hustling his way through it all. Skagboys charts their journey from likely lads to young men addicted to the heroin which has flooded their disintegrating community. This is the 1980s: a time of drugs, poverty, AIDS, violence, political strife, and hatred - but a lot of laughs, and maybe just a little love; a decade that changed Britain for ever. The prequel to the world-renowned Trainspotting, this is an exhilarating and moving book, full of the scabrous humour, salty vernacular and appalling behaviour that has made Irvine Welsh a household name.
©2012 Irvine Welsh (P)2012 Random House Audiobooks
Filth
Summary
With the festive season almost upon him, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson is winding down at work and gearing up socially - kicking off Christmas with a week of sex and drugs in Amsterdam. There are irritating flies in the ointment, though, including a missing wife, a nagging cocaine habit, a dramatic deterioration in his genital health, a string of increasingly demanding extra-marital affairs. The last thing he needs is a messy murder to solve. Still it will mean plenty of overtime, a chance to stitch up some colleagues and finally clinch the promotion he craves. But as Bruce spirals through the lower reaches of degradation and evil, he encounters opposition - in the form of truth and ethical conscience - from the most unexpected quarter of all: his anus. In Bruce Robertson, Welsh has created one of the most corrupt, misanthropic characters in contemporary fiction , and has written a dark, disturbing and very funny novel about sleaze, power, and the abuse of everything. At last, a novel that lives up to its name. Now a major motion picture starring James McAvoy, Jamie Bell and Jim Broadbent.
©2011 Irvine Welsh (P)2011 Random House Audiobooks
A Decent Ride
Summary
A rampaging force of nature is wreaking havoc on the streets of Edinburgh, but has top shagger, drug dealer, gonzo-porn star and taxi driver ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson finally met his match in Hurricane ‘Bawbag’?Can Terry discover the fate of the missing beauty, Jinty Magdalen, and keep her idiot-savant lover, the man-child Wee Jonty, out of prison? Will he find out the real motives of unscrupulous American businessman and reality-TV star Ronald Checker?And, crucially, will Terry be able to negotiate life after a terrible event robs him of his sexual virility, and can a new fascination for the game of golf help him to live without...a decent ride? A Decent Ride sees Irvine Welsh back on home turf, leaving us in the capable hands of one of his most compelling and popular characters, ‘Juice’ Terry Lawson, and introducing another bound for cult status, Wee Jonty MacKay: a man with the genitals and brain of a donkey. In his funniest, filthiest book yet, Irvine Welsh celebrates an unreconstructed misogynist hustler - a central character who is shameless but also, oddly, decent - and finds new ways of making wild comedy out of fantastically dark material, taking on some of the last taboos. So fasten your seatbelts, because this is one ride that could certainly get a little bumpy....
©2015 Irvine Welsh (P)2015 Random House Audiobooks
T2 Trainspotting
Summary
T2 Trainspotting was previously published as Porno. Now a major film directed by Danny Boyle reuniting the cast of Trainspotting. Years on from Trainspotting Sick Boy is back in Edinburgh after a long spell in London. Having failed spectacularly as a hustler, pimp, husband, father and businessman, Sick Boy taps into an opportunity which to him represents one last throw of the dice. However, to realise his ambitions within the Adult industries, Sick Boy must team up with old pal and fellow exile Mark Renton. Still scheming, still scamming, Sick Boy and Renton soon find out that they have unresolved issues to address concerning the unhinged Begbie, the troubled, drug-addled Spud, but, most of all, with each other.
©2002 Irvine Welsh (P)2002 Random House Audiobooks
Glue
Summary
Glue is the story of four boys growing up in the Edinburgh schemes, and about the loyalties, the experiences, and the secrets that hold them together into their 30s. Four boys becoming men: Juice Terry, the work-shy fanny-merchant, with corkscrew curls and sticky fingers; Billy the boxer, driven, controlled, playing to his strengths; Carl, the Milky Bar Kid, drifting along to his own soundtrack; and the doomed Gally, who has one less skin than everyone else and seems to find catastrophe at every corner. As we follow their lives from the '70s into the new century, from punk to techno, from speed to Es, we can see each of them trying to struggle out from under the weight of the conditioning of class and culture, peer pressure, and their parents' hopes that maybe their sons will do better than they did. What binds the four of them is the friendship formed by the scheme, their school, and their ambition to escape from both; their loyalty fused in street morality: back up your mates, don't hit women and, most importantly, never grass, on anyone. Despite its scale and ambition, Glue has all Irvine Welsh's usual pace and vigour, crackling dialogue, scabrous set-pieces and black, black humour, but it is also a grown-up book about growing up, about the way we live our lives, and what happens to us when things become unstuck.
©2001 Irvine Welsh (P)2001 Random House Audiobooks
The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins
Summary
When Lucy Brennan, a Miami Beach personal fitness trainer, disarms a gunman chasing two frightened homeless men, the police and the breaking-news cameras are not far behind and, within hours, Lucy is a media hero. The solitary eye-witness is the depressed and overweight Lena Sorensen, who becomes obsessed with Lucy and signs up as her client - though she seems more interested in the trainer’s body than her own. When the two women find themselves more closely aligned, and can’t stop thinking about the sex lives of Siamese twins, the real problems start.... In the aggressive, foul-mouthed trainer Lucy Brennan, and the needy, manipulative Lena Sorensen, Irvine Welsh has created two of his most memorable female protagonists, and one of the most bizarre, sado-masochistic folies à deux in contemporary fiction. Featuring murder, depravity and revenge - and enormous amounts of food and sex - The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins taps into two great obsessions of our time - how we look and where we live - and tells a story so subversive and dark it blacks out the Florida sun. Warning: Contains explicit content.
©2014 Irvine Welsh (P)2014 Random House Audiobooks
The Acid House
Summary
The characters in this extraordinary book are often - on the surface - depraved, vicious, cowardly and manipulative, but their essential humanity is never undermined. Two professors of philosophy turn pugilists; Leith removal men become the objects of desire for Hollywood goddesses; God turns Boab Coyle into a house-fly; and in the novella, 'A Smart C**t', the drug-addled young hero spins off on a collision course with his past. The Acid House is a bizarre, disturbing and hilarious collection from one of the most uncompromising and original writers around. This collection contains: Conversation between Irvine Welsh and Iggy Pop The Acid House The Granton Star Cause Disnae Matter A Soft Touch Snowman Building Parts For Rico the Squirrel Where the Debris Meets the Sea Sexual Disaster Quartet Sport For All Lisa’s Mum Meets the Queen Mum Granny’s Old Junk The Two Philosophers
©1994 Irvine Welsh (P)1996 Random House Audio
Trainspotting
Summary
Un pugno di ragazzi a Edimburgo e dintorni: il sesso, lo sballo, la rabbia, il vuoto delle giornate. Sono i dannati di un modernissimo inferno chimico, dalla vita sfilacciata e senza scampo. Alla ricerca di un riscatto, di un senso da dare alla propria esistenza - che non sia il vicolo cieco fatto di casa, famiglia e impiego ordinario - trovano nella droga e nella violenza l'unica risposta possibile. Sboccato, indiavolato, travolgente: l'esordio prodigioso di un grande talento letterario, il romanzo shock che ha fatto epoca e dato voce a una nuova generazione. "Trainspotting" è finalmente in audiolibro con un cast eccezionale.
©1996 Guanda (P)2019 Adriano Salani Editore
Trainspotting
Summary
Mark Renton is a very sick young man. He's sick of heroin and sick of trying to get off it but, above all, Renton is thoroughly sick of himself. What with vampire ghost babies, exploding siblings and disatorous sexual encounters, it's pain to see why Renton gloomily contends that 'life does not get any easier'.
©1993 Irvine Welsh (P)1996 Random House Audio
Porno
Summary
Retour à la case départ. Après des années de galère, Renton, Begbie, Sick Boy et Spud se retrouvent dans le huis clos froid et pluvieux d'Édimbourg. Le crack, la misère et les coups foireux sont au rendez-vous, mais la rage de vivre demeure. Avec Nikki, une étudiante invraisemblablement belle et hantée à l'idée de vieillir, ils décident de s'en sortir en produisant... le porno du siècle ! La suite des aventures de Trainspotting, 20 ans après.
©2008 Au Diable Vauvert. Traduit de l'anglais (Écosse) par Laura Derajinski (P)2019 Audible Studios
Skagboys
Summary
Mark Renton sollte glücklich sein. Er ist jung, smart, hat eine hübsche Freundin und Spaß am Studium. Doch im Großbritannien der Achtziger ist kein Platz für ihn und seine Freunde. Man hat ihnen Arbeit, Bildung und Wohlstand versprochen, aber nun ist niemand da, um diese Versprechen auch einzulösen. Als Marks Familie auf tragische Weise zerbricht, gerät sein Leben außer Kontrolle. Dies ist die Geschichte der jugendlichen Außenseiter Mark Renton, Spud Murphy, Franco Begbie und Sick Boy. Eine Geschichte über Drogen, Armut und das Scheitern - aber auch über das Leben, die Freundschaft und vielleicht ein bisschen Liebe...
©2013 Heyne Verlag (P)2013 Random House Audio
One for the Trouble
Summary
One for the Trouble: Book Slam, Volume One is the first release from the UK’s premier literary event. Eighteen Book Slam alumni, from household names like Irvine Welsh and William Boyd to newcomers like Kate Tempest and Sophie Woolley, were approached to take a song title for inspiration for a new short story or poem. Some took this literally (Jon McGregor’s moving reimagining of A House’s 'Endless Art', for example); others suggestively (who’d have thought Grandmaster Flash's 'The Message' would have lead Paul Murray to a heartbreaking tale of schoolboy rugby?). The resulting collection is unique, diverse, and thoroughly entertaining. With most contributions read by the authors’ themselves, others by some of our best-loved actors, One for the Trouble provides a perfect snapshot of the very best contemporary British writing, including: 1. 'Grave Architecture' (Pavement, 1995) by Richard Milward (read by author) 2. 'New Gold Dream' (Simple Minds, 1982 )by Hari Kunzru (read by author) 3. 'New Dawn Fades' (Joy Division, 1979) by Simon Armitage (read by author) 4. 'Comeback Girl' (Republic of Loose, 2005) by Irvine Welsh (read by Andrew Scott) 5. 'I'm Going Slightly Mad' (Queen, 1991) by Bernardine Evaristo (read by author) 6. 'The Bed's Too Big Without You' (Sheila Hylton, 1981) by Kate Tempest (read by author) 7. 'When I'm Sixty-Four' (The Beatles, 1967) by Joe Dunthorne (read by author) 8. 'Tears of a Clown' (Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, 1967) by William Boyd (read by Olivia Colman) 9. 'The Message' (Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, 1982) by Paul Murray (read by Chris O’Dowd) 10. 'Ascension' (John Coltrane, 1966) by Roger Robinson (read by author) 11. 'Violet Stars Happy Hunting!' (Janelle Monáe, 2007) by Helen Oyeyemi (read by author) 12. 'I Read My Sentence…' (Radka Toneff, 1986) by Don Paterson (read by author) 13. 'Let Me Entertain You' (Robbie Williams, 1998) by Patrick Ness (read by Mark Strong) 14. 'Bank Holiday' (Blur, 1994) by Luke Wright (read by author) 15. 'I Am the Walrus' (The Beatles, 1967) by Sophie Woolley (read by author) 16. 'That Summer Feeling' (Jonathan Richman, 1984) by Jon Ronson (read by author) 17. 'Underground' (Ben Folds Five, 1995)by Tim Key (read by author) 18. 'Endless Art' (A House, 1992) by Jon McGregor (read by author)
©2011 Patrick Neate (P)2011 Patrick Neate