This week's literary fiction: MEN IN LOVE by Irvine Welsh, SEASCRAPER by Benjamin Wood, MIGRAINE by Samuel Fisher

Daily Mail​

4 days ago

MEN IN LOVE by Irvine Welsh (Cape £20, 544pp)
In 2017, Welsh said he'd never write another novel about the characters from Trainspotting, but who truly believed him?
Men In Love follows the old gang of heroin-addicted benefit cheats – Renton, Sick Boy and Spud, together with psychotic hardman frenemy Begbie – into the Nineties, each going their own way after Renton sneakily pockets the shared proceeds of a drugs heist.
He's in Amsterdam, Begbie's in jail, Spud is trying to go straight and Sick Boy is prowling for sex... business as usual, then, as Welsh knits their stream-of-consciousness chapters around a farce involving Sick Boy's bid to worm his way into the heart of a civil servant's daughter.
Cartoonish and often in terrible taste, it works, because these characters remain alive on the page, more than 30 years on.
SEASCRAPER by Benjamin Wood (Viking £14.99, 176pp)
I loved Wood's Eighties-set novel, A Station On The Path To Somewhere Better, the chilling story of a boy's catastrophic day out with his estranged dad, a set designer on his favourite TV show.
Themes of illusory promise resurface in his new novel, another wrong-footing and enormously compelling coming-of-age narrative.
Set in the early 1960s on the Kentish coast, it follows a stifled young man who lives with his mum and earns his keep by scraping shrimp from the beach, dreaming about a girl he doesn't have the courage to ask out.
His fortunes change when a Hollywood director pays him an untold sum to scout locations for a new film.
The deal isn't all it seems – but nor is this novel, which drifts from quiet lyricism into a weirder, more hallucinatory style as we delve deeper into the protagonist's haunted interiority.
MIGRAINE by Samuel Fisher (Corsair £13.99, 192 pp)
Fisher's third novel, a standalone follow-up to his 2022 climate dystopia Wivenhoe, transports us to a richly imagined near-future London battered by storms that cause mind-expanding headaches.
The narrator, Ellis, having suffered his first migraine, roams the emptied streets in search of an ex-girlfriend who had them frequently.
As he searches for her, accompanied by a shadowy bookseller who knows more about Ellis's past than he lets on, the novel portrays the social divisions and conspiratorial worldviews that take root as a result of the city's competing experiences of the mysterious chronic pain.
If the texture of Fisher's speculative scenario holds attention, extra compulsion lies in the emerging story of lost love and buried guilt.
Elegiac, languid, interrogatory, it resembles a cross between the cyberpunk of William Gibson and the psychogeography of Iain Sinclair.