'Men In Love': Irvine Welsh to publish new sequel to ‘Trainspotting’

Irvine Welsh has announced that a new sequel to his acclaimed novel “Trainspotting” is coming. 

The Scottish novelist published the cult novel about a group of heroin addicts in 1993 and it was later adapted to the big screen three years later with Danny Boyle’s film starring Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle and Johnny Lee Miller.  

The original film was later followed up in 2017 with sequel T2 Trainspotting, which saw the 1996 cast return. 

It has now been revealed that the literary sequel will be title "Men In Love", and will follow the characters of Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie as they try to leave heroin behind and choose love instead. 

In a statement, Welsh said: “I’m really, really excited about bringing these characters back,” via The Guardian.  

The new novel will focus on a “transitional” period for the characters in their mid-twenties which Welsh described as an “interesting time in the lives of men” who start to become “serious in their quest for romance” as you “start to believe in your own mortality for the first time.” 

There have been other spin-off novels with the "Trainspotting" characters, including the novels "Porno" and "Skagboys". However, "Men In Love" is the first that takes place immediately after the events in "Trainspotting".  

The new book shows working-class characters “having big emotional lives”, which is not often seen in fiction, said Welsh. Working-class people are “generally just walk-on characters that speak in funny accents and entertain the bourgeoisie who have these rich inner lives and who have all these internal conflicts”. 

It opens in the late 1980s: “It was that time at the end of punk and just before acid house, it was that quite fallow time of Thatcherism,” when the “end of history” thesis was popular, said Welsh. “Of course, that’s really been shown to be nonsense.” 

“We made all these decisions that determine how we live now. We opted on to a neoliberal model which we thought would bring us personal freedom, but through the internet it seems now we’ve created a much more oppressive kind of corporate state than ever.”

Alex Russell, Senior Commissioning Editor at Jonathan Cape said: “His blazing new novel illuminate the lives of Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie and the bonds between them. It is three decades since we first met the Trainspotting crew and they are raring to return next summer.” 

"Men In Love" is published on 3 July 2025 and an album sharing the novel’s name by Welsh and The Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra will be released simultaneously.  

“I wanted to do a disco soul album, to extrapolate the emotional goods that you don’t always see in the book” because the characters “are quite hard-edged”, said Welsh. “My books tend to be a bit dark and twisted, but I wanted to show the beauty of love and romance and desire.” 

Additional sources • Guardian