-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
After five years in exile his presence is required at the funeral of local patriarch Joe Murston, even though the last time Stewart saw the Murstons he was running for his life. An estuary town north of Aberdeen, Stonemouth, with its five mile beach, can be beautiful on a sunny day. On a bleak one it can seem to offer little more than sea fog, gangsters, cheap drugs, and a suspension bridge irresistible to suicides. And although there's supposed to be a temporary truce between Stewart and the town's biggest crime family, it's soon clear that only Stewart is taking this promise of peace seriously.
Before long a quick drop into the cold, grey Stoun River begins to look like the easy option, but as he steps back into the minefield of his past to confront his guilt and all that it has lost him, Stewart uncovers ever darker stories, and his homecoming takes a more lethal turn than even he had anticipated.
Tough, funny, fast-paced, and touching, renowned storyteller Iain Banks poignantly evokes adolescence, love, brotherhood, and vengeance in a rite-of-passage novel unlike any other.
"Macabre and quite impossible to put down." - The Financial Times
"Establishes beyond doubt that Banks is a novelist of remarkable talents." - The Daily Telegraph
"Starred Review. Stunning descriptions of coastal Scotland alternate with the rain-soaked violence of Ellie's brothers and Stu's painful flashbacks to his youth." - Publishers Weekly
"Contemporary, hilarious, gritty—yes, this is genre fiction, and no, the genre doesn't get much better than this." - Kirkus
This information about Stonemouth 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".
...
Songs of Summer
by Jane L. Rosen
A young woman crashes a Fire Island wedding to find her birth mother—and gets more than she bargained for.
The Original Daughter
by Jemimah Wei
A dazzling debut by Jemimah Wei about ambition, sisterhood, and family bonds in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.
Erased
by Anna Malaika Tubbs
In Erased, Anna Malaika Tubbs recovers all that American patriarchy has tried to destroy.
Awake in the Floating City
by Susanna Kwan
A debut novel about an artist and a 130-year-old woman bound by love and memory in a future, flooded San Francisco.
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
