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
The Devil to Pay (Parkinson novel) "The Devil to Pay" refers to the task of caulking, or "paying", the deck seams with hot pitch. The outermost seam—between the deck and the hull—is the hardest to caulk. It is called "the devil". The full phrase is "The devil to pay, and no pitch hot"—more generally the phrase is used to refer to any urgent, desperate situation. However this has been disputed in numerous sources and WorldWideWords.com references the phrase as: This novel was the first Parkinson wrote. The next novel in the series is "The Fireship". Parkinson later went back and wrote a prequel, "The Guernseyman", set