Can Irvine Welsh move outside his chosen milieu of young, working-class, drugdazed Scotland and still tell a cracker of a story? On the evidence of these three "romances", the answer is, yes, he can - and still be as horribly hilarious as ever. Here he has grafted the short story on to the longer novella to come up with a strikingly flexible kind of fable in which his usual band of semi-articulate siblings are joined by a romance fiction writer, an armless urban guerilla and - an ordinary middle-class couple. His trump card, of course, is his use of the vernacular, which he handles - "Ye gaun tae the fitba?" - with his usual featherlight flair.
A.W.