Book description
Frank, no ordinary sixteen-year-old, lives with his father outsIde a
remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least,
unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder
brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; and his father
measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank has turned
to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations. In the bizarre
daily rituals there is some solace. But when news comes of Eric's escape
from the hospital Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's
inevitable return - an event that explodes the mysteries of the past and
changes Frank utterly. Iain Banks' celebrated first novel is a work of
extraordinary originality, imagination and horrifying compulsion:
horrifying, because it enters a mind whose realities are not our own,
whose values of life and death are alien to our society; and compulsive,
because the humour and compassion of that mind reach out to us all.
Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the
publication of his first novel, THE WASP FACTORY, in 1984. He has been a
hugely popular writer of fiction ever since, and, as Iain M Banks, of
science fiction.
