The Steep Approach To Garbadale
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3.7 • 9 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
'As good as anything Banks has ever written, if not better' Sunday Telegraph
After years of exile, Alban Wopuld has been summoned back to his family's highland estate, Garbadale. The Wopuld clan are closing ranks. They have built their fortune on the boardgame Empire! - which has become a hugely successful computer game - and now the Americans want to buy them out.
As the family gathers for their Extraordinary General Meeting, old grudges, forbidden passions and dark secrets emerge. What drove Alban's mother to take her own life? And is Alban over Sophie, his bewitching cousin and teenage love?
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest offering from Banks (The Wasp Factory) gives a scion's-eye view of an eccentric, splintering Scottish business family. Having secured immense wealth via the Empire! board game (invented by a relative in 1880) and its various offshoots, the Wopuld family must now decide whether to sell the company: the American Spraint Corporation wants Empire! as a jewel in its crown. As the family gathers to celebrate matriarch Grandma Win's 80th birthday and have a board meeting, Win dispatches grandson Fielding to find his cousin Alban, who has fled the family to become a forester, in order to solidify her vision of the family legacy. Banks flashes back through Alban's painful memories of his mother (who committed suicide) and his cousin Sophie (whom he loved) as he heads home. The book contains a plethora of family secrets, none of which fully drive the plot, but the gothic setting, big passions and light humor suffice. Bank's 23rd book isn't his best, but it carries one all the way up its craggy steeps.
Customer Reviews
Disappointing
Kept waiting for this to get going but it never did. Struggled to finish - not his best work.