Original and sympathetic... Like John Iriving he draws credible, emotionally engaging characters, who find themselves afflicted by the oddest and most unexpected of mishaps... One of those rare novels that is so touching and so odd, you couldn't make it up

One of the most enjoyable reads of the year

Peopled with beautifully-drawn characters and full of colour, drama and pathos, this is a superb first novel

If this was a film it would be made by the Coen brothers. Quirky, charming and very funny

Very accomplished... Edgar is a brilliant creation

'A wild and wondrous tale... I was utterly charmed by it'

'A story that tears at you and calls you back to it... There is also a human heart beating in here, as beautiful and profound as your own'

Welsh performs the mysterious feat of making you think that his characters are real

Trainspotting may be a masterpiece but Skagboys is the reason the artist painted it, and sometimes that’s the most compelling story

A cracking read

It was never going to be light reading, but Welsh’s vigour, wit and energy still make it compulsive

His best work in many years… An essential read

Masterful - crude, violent and poetic by turns... Its banter, outrage and razor wit sing off the page. A film, one suspects, isn't far off

It's brilliant and even more thrilling than its predecessor

A brilliantly funny, scary, sweeping novel with all the energy of Welsh's debut, but imbued with a wider sense of political and social engagement

I'm not sure that in 2012 there will be a single novel, never mind half a dozen, with more verve or nous or life in it than Skagboys. Ye kin pure tell they Booker gadgies'll no huv the baws but...

Trainspotting may be a masterpiece but Skagboys is the reason the artist painted it, and sometimes that's the most compelling story

A cracking read.

Skagboys is a compelling tale...a seriously entertaining piece of work

Skagboys, technically, is a prequel to the Leith author's brilliant 1993 debut...the result is a longer, deeper and more affecting work, one which explains and explores the circumstances under which Renton, Sick Boy, Tommy, Spud and Begbie - a roll call as familiar as Disney's Seven Dwarves for readers of a certain age - became the characters they did... It's an undeniably funny book, funny in that three-wit way of being at once visceral and true. Welsh's knack for dialogue - both ineternal and conversational - remains virtuosic and often exhilarating. It makes for characters you can't help but care about even the psychopaths and amoral chancers like Begbie and Sick Boy... Welsh's finest work to date

One of the most significant writers in Britain. He writes with style, imagination, wit and force.

The voice of punk, grown up, grown wiser and grown eloquent.

It was never going to be light reading, but Welsh's vigour, wit and energy still make it compulsive

While you can place him in a literary tradition which flows from Alasdair Gray and James Kelman (and maybe Joyce before that), Welsh remains a lapsed punk, hung up on the Velvets and Iggy Pop

Like Trainspotting, Skagboys thrusts along with the exuberance of its episodic stories. Welsh hasn't lost his flair for comic set pieces

Welsh somehow manages to be both the Zola of Therese Raquin, and Dostoevsky's Underground Man, ranging between quasi-scientific perspective and a more immersed, troubling one. That he does so for the most part in a furious low Scots vernacular - filthy, or fulthy, and hugely funny at times - may seem remarkable

If you too loved the colloquial tangle of Trainspotting, you'll find a similar rhythm in Skagboys

Welsh revisits his old demons to give us the Trainspotting prequel...Expect more of the same raw wit and energy.

Engaging, heartfelt and brutal.

Quite simply a masterpiece…at least as assured and vibrant in its characterization as Trainspotting, Skagboys is even more on the money politically… this novel more than any other , (including its brilliant predecessor) stands as our spiritual and moral history.

There is enough of what Welsh does well — needle-sharp dialogue, vivid characters and a certainty of place — to make Skagboys his best work in many years…an essential read.

Welsh always spins his yarns with grisly élan.

I ended up charmed beyond measure, if that is the right word for a novel whose odd moments of poignance are regularly booted into touch by death, disillusionment and dereliction.

Every bit as impressive as Trainspotting

Visceral, tragic and comic, with Welsh’s schlock-shock appeal

If you enjoyed Trainspotting, you will adore this prequel... I think that Welsh has achieved the impossible and produced a prequel that betters the main text

Filthy, furious and very funny, this is Welsh back on blistering top form