‘A deeply satirical and thought-provoking thriller’ Sunday Express
A couple of ice cubes, first, then the apple that really started it all. A loft apartment in London’s East End; cool but doomed, demolition and redevelopment slated for the following week. Ken Nott, devoutly contrarian leftish shock-jock attending a mid-week wedding lunch, starts dropping stuff off the roof towards the deserted car park a hundred feet below. Other guests join in and soon half the contents of the flat are following the fruit towards the pitted tarmac… just as mobiles start to ring, and the apartment’s remaining TV is turned on, because apparently a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center…
Praise for Iain Banks:
‘The most imaginative novelist of his generation’ The Times
‘His verve and talent will always be recognised, and his work will always find and enthral new readers’ Ken MacLeod, Guardian
‘His work was mordant, surreal, and fiercely intelligent’ Neil Gaiman
‘An exceptional wordsmith’ Scotsman
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Reviews
Banks's clever, tense book gives a good idea of where fiction might usefully go with this material. Staying away from the media described events at Ground Zero, he impressively details the social aftermath in London: paranoia on underground trains and in high buildings, suspicion of foreigners, a delirious new edge to political argument and sexual encounters
Hugely entertaining
A Buchanesque adventure yarn set in twenty-first-century London
A thrilling read, it's a dazzlingly clever, edgy, suspenseful book