The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Lesbian passion, clinical obesity, murder, conjoined twins, and huge servingsof food, sex and filthy language- it's the brand-new Irvine Welsh...

When Lucy Brennan, a Miami Beach personal-fitness trainer, disarms an apparently crazed gunman chasing two frightened homeless men along a deserted causeway at night, the police and the breaking-news cameras are not far behind. Within hours, Lucy becomes a hero. Her celebrity is short-lived, though- the 'crazed gunman', Sean McCandless, turns out to be a victim of child sexual abuse and the two men are serial paedophiles.

The solitary eye-witness, the depressed and overweight Lena S rensen, thrilled by Lucy's heroism and decisiveness, becomes obsessed with the trainer and enrols as a client at her Bodysculpt gym. It quickly becomes clear that Lena is more interested in Lucy's body than her own. Then, when one of the paedophiles she allowed to escape carries out a heinous sex attack, Lucy's transition from hero to villain is complete. When Lucy imprisons Lena in her mother's deserted real-estate blocks downtown, and can't stop thinking about the sex lives of Siamese twins, the real problems start...

In the aggressive, drill-sergeant trainer, Lucy Brennan, and the needy, manipulative Lena S rensen, Irvine Welsh has created two of his most memorable female protagonists, and one of the most bizarre, sado-masochistic folie deux in contemporary fiction . The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins taps into two great obsessions of our time, personal training regimes and real estate - how we look and where we live - and tells a story so subversive and dark it blacks out the Florida sun.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

In his latest, a reliably maniacal spin on the Pygmalion tale, Welsh (Skagboys) leaves his familiar Edinburgh for Miami Beach, a "sun-drenched refuge for strutting grotesques and desperate narcissists." Lucy Brennan is a tough, foulmouthed, sadistic, bisexual personal trainer who, when she's not finding novel ways to insult her clients and hitting Miami's nightclubs, diligently tracks her calories with an app called Lifemap. She becomes a media sensation when Lena Sorenson, an overweight, immensely successful artist sorely lacking in self-confidence, records her heroically intervening to stop a murderous assault. As for Lena, Lucy's newly enamored admirer, her sculptures imagine "future humans" as we might evolve in millions of years. Thus the two dissimilar, damaged women are less opposites than unlikely twins, both sculptor and trainer being "in the molding business." Lena hires Lucy to help her lose weight, a task that Lucy, at once repulsed by and attracted to her charge, takes outlandishly criminal steps to accomplish. The satirical jibes at an America "swamp[ed] in blubber" are entertaining enough, but the novel is less effective at fleshing out its over-the-top and badly behaving comic caricatures. Listening to the libidinous Lucy's vulgar diatribes wears thin, and occasionally feels a little too like one of those exhausting workouts of which this antiheroine would certainly approve. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Renowned for his Trainspotting series, Welsh, in his latest irreverent novel, shifts focus to Miami, where impromptu vigilante Lucy Brennan becomes a celebrity overnight. Numbers are America's great obsession. How do we measure up? Lucy asks, a self-centered physical trainer who judges people instantly by their height, weight, and BMI. But one night Lucy disarms a gunman on the streets of South Beach, saving two men's lives in the process. Lena Sorensen, an obese homebody with no self-esteem, films the incident on her cell phone and sells it to the media. Drawn to Lucy's physical perfection, Lena becomes obsessed and tracks Lucy down to ask her for help getting in shape. Soon, after the two men Lucy saved turn out to be pedophiles and the gunman she stopped one of their victims, Lucy decides the only way she can help Lena lose weight is to completely control her environment, so she drugs and imprisons Lena, her very own piece of clay. A dark comedy about sex, narcissism, and transformation that's fast, profane, and laugh-out-loud funny. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The popularity of the author's Trainspotting series in your library will dictate your interest in his new novel.--Morgan, Adam Copyright 2015 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A rage-fueled gym rat enters into an abusive, symbiotic relationship with an overweight artist in a brash, decidedly Welsh-ian study of body image and media. Scottish cult legend Welsh (Skagboys, 2012, etc.) takes a detour to Miami Beach for this novel, in which lead narrator Lucy puts her well-machined physique to good use early, stopping a gunman taking aim at two guys on a highway. A witness, Lena, records the incident, making Lucy into a momentary celebrity. But Lucy's dreams of parlaying her semifame into a Biggest Loser-style reality show die quickly: The gunman turns out to have been aiming at alleged pedophiles, complicating the media narrative, and Lucy's adrenalized demeanor alienates her would-be TV partners. Lucy does everything in a fury, from emails to back-alley sex with men and women she picks up in clubs, suggesting that the friendship she starts with Lena won't go well. Indeed, it goes badly in a humanity-at-its-worst kind of way. What begins as Lucy's boot-camp-style fitness plan for Lena, a brilliant artist unlucky in love, turns into a captivity tale that explores the body and our obsession with others to a disarming, at times grotesque degree. (The title refers to a subplot involving a media circus about conjoined twins.) Welsh writes intelligently in two registersblown-gasket Lucy and subdued, self-pitying Lenaand he uses those differing tones to ingeniously explore how self-image influences our perceptions of others. The flaw is that the novel's opening sense of emotional subtlety with both characters degrades into something more farcical, as the women become more blunt representations of fat vs. thin, punctuated with Grand Guignol splashes. Welsh isn't given to hollow provocation, but the depth of his social critique is undermined by his more absurd plot turns. A sometimes pleasurably over-the-top, sometimes simplistic proof that physical and mental health aren't always intertwined. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.