Irvine Welsh

Ecstasy

From the celebrated author of the bestselling cult classic Trainspotting, a new work of fiction that triumphantly puts the E back in Eros.

With three delightful tales of love and its ups and downs, the ever-surprising Irvine Welsh virtually invents a new genre of fiction: the chemical romance .

In "Lorraine Goes to Livingston," a bestselling authoress of Regency romances, paralyzed and bedridden, plans her revenge on gambling, whoring husband with the aid of her nurse Lorraine. In "Fortune's Always Hiding," flawed beauty Samantha Worthington enlists a smitten young soccer thug to find the man who marketed the drug that crippled her from birth—in order to give his a taste of his own disastrous medicine. In the upbeat final tale "The Undefeated," we experience the transfiguring passion of the miserably married young yuppie Heather and the raver Lloyd from Leith—a grand affair played out to a house music beat.

As these fools for love pursue it in all the wrong places, Ecstasy is guaranteed to set pulses racing and hearts aflutter.

"Welsh writes with a skill, wit and compassion that amounts to genius. He is the best thing that has happened to British writing in decades."—Sunday Times [London]

"[O]ne of the most significant writers in Britain. He writes with style, imagination, wit, and force, and in a voice which those alienated by much current fiction clearly want to hear."—Times Literary Supplement

"Reading Irvine Welsh is like watching Tarantino—exciting, urgent, thrilling, repulsive."—The Spectator

"Welsh's world is piky, trashy, and brutal. It is also brilliant, hilarious, and infused with a kind of punkish morality...outrageously funny."—Sunday Express

"Ecstasy is spiced with horror, passion and necrophilia. These flavors help make the tales more tempting, but it is Irvine Welsh's infectious Scottish humor, balanced wry observation with a cavalier canniness, which keeps the reader turning the pages...unforgettably original!"&%151;The Literary Review