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      The Crow Road: Summary and Media Reviews

The Crow Road by Iain Banks: Book summary and media reviews.

The Crow Road The Crow Road
by Iain Banks
Published in USA Sep 2008,
500 pages.
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Book Summary
"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:
"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.
More Information:
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under the cunning nom-de-plume Iain M Banks) has been published in the USA but most of his mainstream novels have lain unpublished and therefore undiscovered by USA readers.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.




The information about The Crow Road shown above was first featured in "BookBrowse Previews" - BookBrowse's monthly online-magazine that keeps our members abreast of notable and high-profile books publishing in the coming weeks. In most cases, the reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author of this book and feel that the reviews shown do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, please send us a message with the mainstream media reviews that you would like to see added.

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