BANKS, Iain.

£600 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Wasp Factory. First edition, signed by the author on the title page. This is Banks's first book, and its commercial success allowed him to pursue a career as a writer. The Wasp Factory predates the science fiction works the author published as Iain M. Banks. He struggled to publish his genre writing in the early 1980s, which prompted him to write a novel with greater mainstream literary appeal. He reflects in a Guardian article from 2008, "In the end I went for something that kept me closer to my by-then comfort zone: a first-person narrative set on a remote Scottish nearly-island told by a normality-challenged teenager with severe violence issues allowed me to treat my story as something resembling SF. The island could be envisaged as a planet, and Frank, the protagonist, almost as an alien."

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