Irvine Welsh was born in 1958 in Leith, an area of Edinburgh that largely grew out of its port and surrounding industries and which has always maintained an ambivalent relationship with the rest of the city. Welsh's own background embodies a series of instructive social and cultural tensions and overlappings. With regard to social class Welsh's childhood on housing schemes must be considered alongside his entrepreneurial speculation in 1980's property development and rise as a management consultant. The major themes of this book are: the decimation of traditional working-class identities and community; the social opportunities and exclusions of contemporary society; paradigm shifts in traditional forms of masculinity and gender relations due to de-industrialisation and a move away from large, heavy industry to an economy of flexible accumulation and service sector employment. The interplay of a multiplicity of voices in Welsh's work fully embodies Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia. Welsh's writing revels in what Bakhtin calls grammatica jocosa, the transgression of conventional grammatical order and the revelation of erotic, obscene, punning or resistant counterpoints and over-turnings of received meanings. The book will attest to Welsh's resistance to accepted narratives of national and regional identification and his investigation of the voices produced from the margins of contemporary social fragmentation.