The Crow Road (Paperback)

from TeaTimeCoder

A wonderful heart-warming family story, oh who am I kidding, this is Ian Banks and the book is grim like Glasgow. Banks has the knack of making slightly surreal and farcical situations play out believably, like an atheist being smitten by god on top of a church tower. When at the end of the book ...

from Eyejaybee

This is, in my opinion, Iain Banks's finest novels, and one of my all time favourites. It manages to mix the comic (from the grand opening line, "It was the day my grandmother exploded") and the tragic, with the customary dysfunctional family that banks seems always to portray so deftly. Essentia...

from Carol420

This story literally begins with a bang. Two things brought me and this book together...well actually three...,many of you know by now that I will read strange things in order to fulfill a challenge. Other than the challenge...I had to see if grandma literally exploded...and it was written by one...

from Eyejaybee

This novel is multi-facted: a mystery, a panoramic history of Scotland, at times a side-splitting comedy, yet also a touching love story. Essentially the book centres on life on the West coast of Scotland and shows how one can never whooly shed one's past, however ardently one might strive to rei...

from RobertDay

Prentice McHoan is an under-graduate studying history at Glasgow University in the late 1980s. His extended family are well-placed Scots middle class from Argyll. but in the course of a year Prentice and his family go through a time of upheaval that will leave none of them untouched. I came to 'T...