The Wasp Factory

by Iain M. Banks

The Wasp Factory is a bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath – one of the most infamous of contemporary Scottish novels.

“Two years after I killed Blyth, I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage that I was going through.”

Enter – if you can bear it – the extraordinary private world of Frank, just 16, and unconventional, to say the least.

Publication date
  • September 4, 2008