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The polarizing literary debut by Scottish author Ian Banks, The Wasp Factory is the bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath.
Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least:
Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim.
That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again.
It was just a stage I was going through.
"Brilliant...irresistible...compelling." —The New York Times
"Macabre, bizarre, and impossible to put down." —The Financial Times
"A literary equivalent of the nastiest brand of juvenile delinquency." —Times Literary Supplement
This information about The Wasp Factory was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Iain (Menzies) Banks was born in Fife in 1954, and was educated at Stirling
University, where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology.
He came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of
his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984.
His first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas, was published in 1987.
He continued to write both mainstream fiction (as Iain Banks) and science
fiction (as Iain M. Banks).
He was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, innovative and exciting writers
of his generation: The Guardian called him "the standard by which the
rest of SF is judged". William Gibson, the New York Times-bestselling
author of Spook Country described Banks as a "phenomenon".
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Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
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