A book written with the relentless exactness of Junkie (by William Burroughs), with the anguished inquisitiveness of Cain's Book (by Alexander Trocchi), with the desperate humor of a classic noir, and with the expressive dynamism of Lowry and Nabokov.

The mosaics and fragments of the daily life of a group of young people in their unceasing movement from the frozen fringe to the flammable center of modern cities.

The harshness, the plunge into drugs, unemployment, paranoia, the sense of futility, the corpses of all hopeful prospects, the outbursts of unpredictable violence but also of a wounded lyricism, compose the dark music of this book, a music as aggressive as Punk, complex and improvisational as Jazz, dynamically melancholic as the Blues.

Irwin Welsh explores the hell of a world that has lost its center, its rhythm, and its coherence, tracking within the jungle of concrete, steel, and a tattered social fabric, and crushes us with the material of his exploration.