'Trainspotting'

Irvine Welsh's books are some of my favorites to read. No one writes with the ferocity and energy quite like him in this extraordinary style.

Each chapter is told from a first-person point of view of one of the characters, most notably the novels main protagonists Mark Renton, Simon Williamson, Spud and Franco Begbie. Not unlike Shakespeare having characters of royalty or title speak in verse whilst plebians speak in prose, Welsh's characters speak in the exact tongue that they would actually use. The writing is purely phonetic. Particularly, Begbie, Renton's and Spud's narratives are muddled Scots.

Meanwhile, other characters, like Davie are in more Scottish English.

Generally, though, the characters carry the load and the load is nothing more than debauchery: Drugs and sex. Some violence. It's a set of ticking timebombs. Just waiting for one to explode (OD, getting beat to death by Begbie or winding up in prison). It's a dark novel set in a city that seemingly has zero hope with characters simply waiting for death to pass by.