The Wasp Factory - by Iain Banks (Paperback)

About the Book

Powerful, perverse, and engrossing, this controversial novel offers a graphic portrait of a serial killer told in the first-person. "Read it if you dare!"--"The Daily Express".

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Daily Express Read it if you dare.

Mail on Sunday A mighty imagination has arrived on the scene.

Punch The Wasp Factory is a first novel not only of tremendous promise, but also of achievement, a minor masterpiece perhaps.

The Financial Times Macabre, bizarre, and impossible to put down.

The Independent One of the top 100 novels of the century.

The New York Times Brilliant...irresistible...compelling.

The Scotsman There's nothing to force you, having been warned, to read it; nor do I recommend it.

The Times (London) Rubbish!

Times Literary Supplement A literary equivalent of the nastiest brand of juvenile delinquency.

About the Author

Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the original publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, recently selected in a British poll as one of the top 100 novels of the century. Since then he has gained enormous popular and critical acclaim with further works of fiction and, as Iain M. Banks, science fiction. He lives in Scotland