'Banks once again demonstrates his extraordinary dark powers of imagination' Sunday Times

Hisako Onada, world-famous cellist, refuses to fly. And so she travels to Europe as a passenger on a tanker bound through the Panama Canal. But Panama is a country whose politics are as volatile as the local freedom fighters. When Hisako's ship is captured, it is not long before the atmosphere is as flammable as an oxy-acetylene torch, and the tension as sharp as the spike on the cello...


Praise for Iain Banks:

'The most imaginative novelist of his generation' The Times

'His verve and talent will always be recognised, and his work will always find and enthral new readers' Ken MacLeod, Guardian

'His work was mordant, surreal, and fiercely intelligent' Neil Gaiman

'An exceptional wordsmith' Scotsman

Iain Banks's classic novel, reissued with a striking new cover

About the Author
Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. He gained enormous popular and critical acclaim for both his mainstream and his science fiction novels. Iain Banks died in June 2013.

Reviews
Extraordinary, brilliant, bloody * Fay Weldon *
Currents of dark wit swirl through Banks' writing, enriching its buoyancy... and, like Graham Greene, he can readily open the reader's senses to the 'foreignness' of places * Scotland on Sunday *
Short, compact and brilliantly crafted * Scotsman *
His technical facility with language now matches his instinct for storytelling, and the combination makes him one of the best British novelists * Guardian *
What makes Banks a significant novelist is the love and effort that go into his works, and his acute sense of the ways in which people can suffer * Independent on Sunday *
Banks is a phenomenon: the wildly successful, fearlessly creative author of brilliant and disturbing non-genre novels (The Wasp Factory, Complicity), he's equally at home writing pure science fiction (like Feersum Endjinn) of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance. I suspect we have actual laws against this sort of thing in the United States, but Iain Banks, with the "M" or without, is currently a legal import * William Gibson *



Book Information
ISBN 9780349139234
Author Iain Banks
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Abacus
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Weight(grams) 204g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 19mm