Irvine Welsh has today (December 6) announced that a new sequel to his acclaimed novel Trainspotting is on the way.
Welsh published the cult novel in 1993 and it was later turned into a film via director Danny Boyle. They both followed the lives of a group of heroin addicts and their friends living in Leith, Edinburgh.
The original Trainspotting film was later followed up in 2017 with sequel T2 Trainspotting, which saw original stars Ewan Bremner (Spud), Robert Carlyle (Begbie), Ewan McGregor (Renton), Jonny Lee Miller (Sick Boy) and Kelly Macdonald (Diane) all return.
Announcing the news of the new novel on social media, it was revealed that it would be called Men In Love and would follow Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie as they try to leave heroin behind and pursue love instead.
In a statement, Welsh said: “I’m really, really excited about bringing these characters back,” via The Guardian.
The novel will arrive on July 3 2025 and focuses on a “transitional” period for the characters in their mid-twenties which Welsh described as an “interesting time in the lives of men” who start to become “serious in their quest for romance” as you “start to believe in your own mortality for the first time.”
While there have been other spin-off novels with the characters including Porno and Skagboys, this is the first that takes place immediately after the events in Trainspotting.
Welsh went on to add that the book shows working-class characters “having big emotional lives” something he says is rarely seen in fiction. He added that they’re “generally just walk-on characters that speak in funny accents and entertain the bourgeoise who have all these rich inner lives and who have all these internal conflicts.”
He also went on to say the novel opens in the late ‘80s. “It was that time at the end of punk and just before acid house, it was that quite fallow time of Thatcherism.”
He added: “I know for myself at the time, I thought, ‘Well, I’ve had my fun with punk and with drugs and all that, and I just want to kind of settle down to a nice life. Then acid house came along and completely turned that on its head.”
Alex Russell, Senior Commissioning Editor at Jonathan Cape said: “His blazing new novel illuminate the lives of Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie and the bonds between them. It is three decades since we first met the Trainspotting crew and they are raring to return next summer.”
An album with the same name as the novel will also be released in July by Welsh and the Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra, something that is described as a “disco soul album” to “extrapolate the emotional goods that you don’t always see in the book.”
Earlier this year, Kneecap spoke to NME about the influence of Trainspotting on their film biopic, and what it was like to receive praise from Welsh for that.
Written and directed by Rich Peppiatt, the feature-length comedy-drama won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It is due to arrive in Irish cinemas on August 8, before hitting the big screen in the UK on August 28. It was also ranked at number one in NME’s films of the year 2024.
The film managed to catch the attention of Welsh, who described it on social media as “absolutely fucking phenomenal”.
“We love the movie, but we weren’t sure if it would ever go beyond Belfast,” said the band’s Móglaí Bap. “It’s very colloquial. It’s kind of like Trainspotting in that way. Then we went to Sundance and got the audience award. It’s similar to our music; people just get the energy and the craic out of it. I don’t know think Americans know what a tout is, but it didn’t stop them enjoying it.”
“Obviously we loosely took some ideas from Trainspotting and stuff, then we had Irvine Welsh who wrote it coming out and saying it was the best film he’d seen in fucking years or something,” added bandmate DJ Próvaí. “That’s massive praise for us. Obviously we’re a music band we’re doing fucking acting jobs that we’d never done before and people were dubious about whether or not we were going to make it as fucking actors; but go see it.”
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