When you've been wandering about a bookshop trying to get into average middle eastern chick lit (The Girls of Riyadh) or over well-reviewed cross cultural cuisine drama (In the Kitchen by Monica Ali), there's nothing like a bit of Irvine Welsh to cheer you up.
Whatever critics might say about Welsh, you're always guaranteed sex, drugs and violence. And if you can follow the Scottish dialect well enough, plenty of intelligence and humour.
As the title suggests, this is a collection of short stories that have mostly been published before. In A Fault on the Line, a man gets frustrated with his wife after she has a train accident and makes him miss the football. In Catholic Guilt (You Know You Love It) , a homophobic thug dies and is forced to have gay sex until he admits to St. Peter that he's started to enjoy it. These stories might lack subtlety, but they're weird, dark and brilliantly entertaining.
There is one new novella in the collection. I Am Miami is set in Irvine Welsh's new home but brings up some characters from other books, in particular tail-chasing Terry Lawson, now nearing forty.
The other main character's are Ewart, Lawson's DJ friend, and their ex- schoolteacher, Mr. Black, who is now a bitter, fundamentalist Christian. All the above characters are Scottish; Mr. Black has followed his younger family to America, Ewart and Lawso are visiting Miami because Ewart is DJ-ing.
Mr. Black is soon in a nightclub, he goes there to find Ewart and Lawson, to desperately see if his younger days of teaching yielded any good , Christian results. He finds them there, high on E, soon to score some cocaine and with two very pretty, but 'sinfully dressed' girls.
The group get on well, in a drug addled kind of way, and after accidentally imbibing a strange tea, Mr. Black reaches a kind of redemption.
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