Canal Dreams, Iain Banks
Canal Dreams, Iain Banks
List: $22.99 | Sale: $16.09
Club: $11.49

Canal Dreams

Author: Iain Banks

Narrator: Lisa Coleman

Unabridged: 7 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/23/2014


Synopsis

Hisako Onoda, 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 her cello...

CANAL DREAMS is a novel of deceptive simplicity and dark, original power: stark psychological insights mesh with vividly realised scenarios in an ominous projection of global realpolitik. The result is yet another major landmark in the quite remarkable career of an outstanding modern novelist.

About Iain Banks

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

Goodreads review by Manny on November 05, 2012

I was thinking this book might be a good present for a cellist - my brother is a cellist, and suddenly the Christmas decorations are out in all the shops. But really, it's a better present for a cellist who has a thing for Japanese women and weird dreams. And ideally, also for martial arts, extreme......more

Goodreads review by Nandakishore on May 07, 2021

Hisako Onoda in the first part of the novel: Hisako Onoda in the second part: Hisako Onoda in the last part: And that's all, folks!......more

Goodreads review by Chris on July 15, 2012

The second time I've tried to read this book and this time I finished it. It was good. Not the best book I've ever read, but certainly not the worst. It was easier to read this time around because the central character is Japanese and since I live in Japan I could understand the extend of research Ba......more

Goodreads review by Brad on December 09, 2014

Rape. Ultra-violence. Outdated dystopia. Cold War prophecy gone awry. Cello. Obnoxious Americans. Anti-US Foreign Policy and its crimes. Panama Canal. SCUBA. History lessons. Imaginings of Japan. Hisako Onoda. Fire. Blood. This is one bloody tale, one of Iain Banks bloodier tales, which is saying a l......more

Goodreads review by Anu on June 28, 2016

This book was weird. I mean, it had elements that I like in a book generally; like a very well-fleshed out and likable protagonist, a pretty solid, albeit predictable story line, and sublime writing. But something didn't click; something I can't exactly put my finger on. A symphony cellist braves th......more


Quotes

I must have read pretty much all Iain Banks... I cannot think of a more enjoyable writer... Canal Dreams would make a terrific move. It is just as topical now as it was when it appeared, perhaps more so. There is a love story, along with terrorists and hostages, great locations - mostly in the great lake in the middle of the Panama Canal - and it was thrilling Guardian

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