Men in Love

Our summary description

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In the late 1980s, as Thatcher’s Britain reaches its closing years, Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie find themselves on the edge of a new era. Leaving heroin behind and split up after a drug deal gone wrong, each of them wants the same thing in different forms: to feel alive.

They throw themselves into sex and romance, into schemes and small chances, into the call of the dance floor with its promise of joy and redemption. The days are filled with wanting and escape, with the sense that a future might still be possible if you move fast enough.

For Sick Boy, that possibility sharpens into something like a plan when he begins an intense relationship with Amanda, his princess, rich and connected, everything he is not. When they set a date for their wedding, he imagines a way to take control at last.

As the 1990s dawn, the question hangs over them. Will love be the answer, or just another doomed quest.