Irvine Welsh to publish new sequel to ‘Trainspotting’

nme.com:

Trainspotting is on the way.Welsh published the cult novel in 1993 and it was later turned into a film via director Danny Boyle.

They both followed the lives of a group of heroin addicts and their friends living in Leith, Edinburgh.The original Trainspotting film was later followed up in 2017 with sequel T2 Trainspotting, which saw original stars Ewan Bremner (Spud), Robert Carlyle (Begbie), Ewan McGregor (Renton), Jonny Lee Miller (Sick Boy) and Kelly Macdonald (Diane) all return.Announcing the news of the new novel on social media, it was revealed that it would be called Men In Love and would follow Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie as they try to leave heroin behind and pursue love instead.In a statement, Welsh said: “I’m really, really excited about bringing these characters back,” via The Guardian.

A post shared by Irvine Welsh (@irvine.welsh)The novel will arrive on July 3 2025 and focuses on a “transitional” period for the characters in their mid-twenties which Welsh described as an “interesting time in the lives of men” who start to become “serious in their quest for romance” as you “start to believe in your own mortality for the first time.”While there have been other spin-off novels with the characters including Porno and Skagboys, this is the first that takes place immediately after the events in Trainspotting.Welsh went on to add that the book shows working-class characters “having big emotional lives” something he says is rarely seen in fiction.

He added that they’re “generally just walk-on characters that speak in funny accents and entertain the bourgeoise who have all these rich inner lives and who have all these internal conflicts.”He also went on to say the novel opens in the late ‘80s. “It was that time.