The Wasp Factory

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.

ISBN 0349101779   DEWEY edition DC21 ISBN13 9780349101774 (What's this?)   Pages 256 Publisher Little, Brown Book Group   Weight (grammes) 205 Imprint Abacus   Published in London Format Paperback   Previous ISBN 9780708837610 Publication date 01 Apr 1992   Height (mm) 197 Library of Congress PR6052.A48   Width (mm) 127 DEWEY 823.914   Academic level General

* 'A Gothic horror story of quite exceptional quality...macabre, bizarre ...quite impossible to put down' - FINANCIAL TIMES * 'A mighty imagination has arrived on the scene' - MAIL ON SUNDAY

i have read a lot of books, and yet this is the only one that i think of whenever anyone asks me to recommend them a book - jackie parker



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