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Canal Dreams

On sale

23rd January 2014

Price: £17.99

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Selected: Audiobook Downloadable / ISBN-13: 9781405531146

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Hisako Onoda, 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 her cello…

CANAL DREAMS is a novel of deceptive simplicity and dark, original power: stark psychological insights mesh with vividly realised scenarios in an ominous projection of global realpolitik. The result is yet another major landmark in the quite remarkable career of an outstanding modern novelist.

Reviews

William Gibson
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
Independent on Sunday
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
Scotland on Sunday
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
Guardian
His technical facility with language now matches his instinct for storytelling, and the combination makes him one of the best British novelists
Sam Neill, Guardian
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
Fay Weldon
Extraordinary, brilliant, bloody
Scotsman
Short, compact and brilliantly crafted