FICTION
Released: Nov. 15, 2012
"Contemporary, hilarious, gritty--yes, this is genre fiction, and no, the genre doesn't get much better than this."
This novel considers the question of how to return home after a long absence, particularly when your ex-fiancee is the eldest daughter of a local crime boss.
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FICTION
Released: Oct. 9, 2012
"Sheer delight."
Addition to Banks' wonderful space-opera series (without the middle initial, he also writes impressive mainstream novels) about the far-future galactic Culture (
Surface Detail, 2010, etc.), a liberal-anarchic, multispecies civilization guided and sustained, more or less invisibly, by Minds, artificial intelligences that take such physical forms as spaceships and habitats.
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FICTION
Released: Aug. 1, 2001
"By turns imposing, ingenious, whimsical, and wrenching, though too amorphous to fully satisfy."
FICTION
Released: Nov. 8, 2000
"Sprinkled with erudite puns ("Was I a Freudian? . . . no, I was a Schadenfreudian") and topical references: a smart, breezy, entertainment--something John Grisham might have written if, say, he were a better stylist with more imagination."
From the usually thought-provoking, even disturbing, Banks (
A Song of Stone, 1998, etc.) comes a clever, well-paced, but surprisingly slight business thriller.
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FICTION
Released: Jan. 11, 2000
"Atmospheric, ironic, resourceful, and all the parts add up—yet something sets the teeth on edge."
Another book that, despite a June 1998 UK hardcover and a May 1999 UK paperback, the US publishers somehow were unable to convey to Kirkus swiftly enough for a timely pre-publication review.
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FICTION
Released: Sept. 1, 1998
"Not for the squeamish, but those looking for a confrontational work will find this a daring, deeply unsettling meditation on the very human face of evil."
A grim, mordant portrait of the corrosive effects of moral corruption and a generalized atmosphere of violence, played out against the brutal background of a Bosnian-style war.
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FICTION
Released: Feb. 1, 1997
"Not Invented Here and Shoot Them Later) don't compensate for the absence of real characters."
From versatile Scottish writer Banks, another sf yarn about the tolerant, diverse, far-future Culture (The Player of Games, 1989, etc.).
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FICTION
Released: July 1, 1995
"Dazzling stuff: a shame it doesn't add up."
Intricate, disconcerting far-future saga from the author The Player of Games (1989), etc., in which the Encroachment, a cloud of space dust, threatens to extinguish all life on Earth.
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FICTION
Released: Jan. 13, 1995
"Literate and satisfying, with a very nice ending."
An engrossing thriller in which all the murder victims apparently deserve, if not their cruel fates, at least a reckoning, leaving the hero (and the reader) with a guilty sense of admiration and appreciation for the clever serial killer.
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FICTION
Released: Feb. 22, 1989
"Predictable, certainly, and less imaginative than Phlebas, but technically much more solid: honorably crafted work, often engrossing despite some sluggish patches."
Following Consider Phlebas (1988), another distant-future yarn featuring the Culture—a tolerant, relaxed, moneyless civilization unobtrusively directed by superintelligent machine Minds.
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