The Steep Approach To Garbadale

This was basically a considerably inferior version of "The Crow Road". * Dysfunctional Scottish family, with impossibly large cast of characters, and a healthy dollop of eccentric old folk? Check. * Some of whom are obscenely rich? Check * Rich enough to live in a remote, picturesque Scottish castle? C......more

I am a huge Iain Banks fan, as you can see from my bookshelf... so this book was seriously disappointing. He's usually so full of energy and wacky ideas, but for once he's on autopilot. As several of the other reviewers point out, he's recycled a lot of material from The Crow Road. Unfortunately, it......more

It's a truism that there are two Iain Banks -- Iain the contemporary fiction writer and Iain M. the science fiction writer. But it's also the case that there are two distinct modes of Iain Banks novels -- the grim and nihilistic (Wasp Factory, The Business, Song of Stone, etc.) versus the sweeping S......more

Right through the 1990s Iain Banks, with or without the M, was my number one author - an edgy, blackly humorous writer who wasn't afraid to mess around with his readers' expectations. Banks would offer up, on the one hand, self-assuredly erudite, multi-layered and (dare I say it?) near-literary text......more

A sprawling family saga set on a picturesque Highland estate, filled with tangled relationships, generational conflicts, unrequited love, and a dark family secret that reverberates through the plot. The central character is Alban, returning to the family fold after several disillusioned years in sel......more