"It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach."
So begins Iain Banks' The Crow Road, the tale of Prentice McHoan and his complex but enduring Scottish family. Prentice, preoccupied with thoughts of sex, death, booze, drugs, and God, has returned to his home village of Gallanach full of questions about the McHoan past, present, and future.
When his beloved Uncle Rory disappears, Prentice becomes obsessed with the papers Rory left behind — the notes and sketches for a book called The Crow Road. With the help of an old friend, Prentice sets out to solve the mystery of his uncle’s disappearance, inadvertently confronting the McHoans’ long association with tragedy — an association that includes his sister’s fatal car crash and his father’s dramatic death by lightning.
The Crow Road is a coming-of-age story as only Iain Banks could write — an arresting combination of dark humor, menace, and thought-provoking meditations on the nature of love, mortality, and identity.
BOOK REVIEWS
Media Reviews
"Riveting ... exhilarating ... its pace, development, intensity and, above all, its hip and sexy humour never allow it to flag. With The Crow Road, Banks reinforces his credentials as one of the most able, energetic and stimulating writers we have in the UK." - Time Out.
"Beginning with a bang and ending with an exclamation mark ... the enfant explosif of the Brit pack." - Scotland on Sunday.
Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Nicole A moving family drama This was a moving family drama with complex characters and an intricate story line. Told in flashback, the story unfolds in pieces and sometimes the author make you work to understand but it is a a rewarding and interesting read. From the feisty... Read More
Rated of 5
by Rhonda The Crow Road The book, Crow Road was the first book that I have read by author Iain Banks. After I figured out what the author was doing with the shifting in and out of generations, I really was able to enjoy piecing together information about the... Read More
Iain Banks's first novel, The Wasp Factory was published in the UK in 1984 to much critical acclaim. In the years since he's won acclaim in the UK for both his mainstream novels and his sci-fi works. Much of Banks's science fiction (written under the cunning nom-de-plume Iain M Banks) has been published in the USA but most of his mainstream novels have lain unpublished and therefore undiscovered by USA readers. A case in point being The Crow Road - a No.1 bestseller in the UK in the early 1990s, adapted for TV by the BBC in 1996 and still in print and selling well in the UK - which is being published for the first time in the USA by MacAdam/Cage this September.
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