The Wasp Factory

Enter - if you can bear it - the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least... Frank lives with his father outside a remote Scottish village. 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. 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. 'A Gothic horror story of quite exceptional quality...macabre, bizarre and...quite impossible to put down' FINANCIAL TIMES 'One of the most brilliant first novels I have come across' DAILY TELEGRAPH