Irvine Welsh was born in 1958 in Leith, an area of Edinburgh that largely grew out of its port and surrounding industries and which has always maintained an ambivalent relationship with the rest of the city. The major themes of this book are the decimation of traditional working-class identities and community; the social opportunities and exclusions of contemporary society; paradigm shifts in traditional forms of masculinity and gender relations due to de-industrialisation and a move away from large, heavy industry to an economy of flexible accumulation and service sector employment. Welsh's writing certainly diagnoses and details 'morbid symptoms' emerging out of what one of his characters terms 'the long dark night of late capitalism'. The book will attest to Welsh's resistance to accepted narratives of national and regional identification and his investigation of the voices produced from the margins of contemporary social fragmentation.