Skagboys Skagboys Skagboys is a 2012 novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh. It is a prequel to his 1993 novel "Trainspotting", and its 2002 sequel "Porno". It follows the earlier lives of characters Renton and Sick Boy as they first descend into heroin addiction. When Welsh described the novel he said: "I think I’m going to call it Skag Boys: “skag” is my favourite word for heroin. It's set before they’re into heroin and investigates how the main characters become junkies, the family dynamics, the anxieties of young men. A lot of the fringe characters become more prominent". "I had a
John Irving the 1981 O. Henry Prize Stories collection. In 1985, Irving published "The Cider House Rules". An epic set in a Maine orphanage, the novel's central topic is abortion. Many drew parallels between the novel and Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist" (1838). Irving's next novel was "A Prayer for Owen Meany" (1989), another New England family epic about religion set in a New England boarding school and in Toronto, Ontario. The novel was influenced by "The Tin Drum" (1959) by Günter Grass, and the plot contains further allusions to "The Scarlet Letter" (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne and the works of Dickens. In