‘Banks once again demonstrates his extraordinary dark powers of imagination’ Sunday Times
Hisako Onada, world-famous cellist, refuses to fly. And so she travels to Europe as a passenger on a tanker bound through the Panama Canal. But Panama is a country whose politics are as volatile as the local freedom fighters. When Hisako’s ship is captured, it is not long before the atmosphere is as flammable as an oxy-acetylene torch, and the tension as sharp as the spike on the cello…
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
Short, compact and brilliantly crafted
What makes Banks a significant novelist is the love and effort that go into his works, and his acute sense of the ways in which people can suffer
I must have read pretty much all Iain Banks... I cannot think of a more enjoyable writer... Canal Dreams would make a terrific move. It is just as topical now as it was when it appeared, perhaps more so. There is a love story, along with terrorists and hostages, great locations - mostly in the great lake in the middle of the Panama Canal - and it was thrilling
Banks is a phenomenon: the wildly successful, fearlessly creative author of brilliant and disturbing non-genre novels (The Wasp Factory, Complicity), he's equally at home writing pure science fiction (like Feersum Endjinn) of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance. I suspect we have actual laws against this sort of thing in the United States, but Iain Banks, with the "M" or without, is currently a legal import
Extraordinary, brilliant, bloody
His technical facility with language now matches his instinct for storytelling, and the combination makes him one of the best British novelists
Currents of dark wit swirl through Banks' writing, enriching its buoyancy... and, like Graham Greene, he can readily open the reader's senses to the 'foreignness' of places