The eighth Culture book from the awesome imagination of Iain M. Banks, a modern master of science fiction.
In a world renowned within a galaxy full of wonders, a crime within a war. For one man it means a desperate flight, and a search for the one - maybe two - people who could clear his name. For his brother it means a life lived under constant threat of treachery and murder. And for their sister, it means returning to a place she'd thought abandoned forever.
Only the sister is not what she once was; Djan Seriy Anaplian has become an agent of the Culture's Special Circumstances section, charged with high-level interference in civilisations throughout the greater galaxy.
Concealing her new identity - and her particular set of abilities - might be a dangerous strategy. In the world to which Anaplian returns, nothing is quite as it seems; and determining the appropriate level of interference in someone else's war is never a simple matter.
Praise for the Culture series:
'Epic in scope, ambitious in its ideas and absorbing in its execution' Independent on Sunday
'Banks has created one of the most enduring and endearing visions of the future' Guardian
'Jam-packed with extraordinary invention' Scotsman
'Compulsive reading' Sunday Telegraph
The Culture series:
Consider Phlebas
The Player of Games
Use of Weapons
The State of the Art
Excession
Inversions
Look to Windward
Matter
Surface Detail
The Hydrogen Sonata
Other books by Iain M. Banks:
Against a Dark Background
Feersum Endjinn
The Algebraist
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 9781841494197
Number of pages: 656
Weight: 450 g
Dimensions: 196 x 129 x 45 mm
You can always expect the unexpected with an Iain M. Banks novel. So sit back and enjoy a tale with more than a twist or three in Matter. For a start, it's a rattling good story: a man accused of something he didn't do. Lots of action, lots of mind-boggling imaginative thought in this excellent piece of SF, read by Toby Longworth - Daily Express
You can, if you must, draw clever comparisons between the conflicts in Matter and what's happening in Iraq. Or you can just sit back and listen to Toby Longworth's tongue-in-cheek reading of a very funny book - The Guardian
Widescreen, baroque science fiction . . . Another fine addition to Banks's Culture series - Guardian
There is now no British SF writer to whose work I look forward with greater keenness - The Times
This is one of the best Banks books I've read for a long time. A real return to form.
With a vast assortment of science-fiction novels under his belt, Iain M. Banks knows how to write well. What is even more pleasing to know is that he is yet to have written a single bad novel.
As a new tale to add to...
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A marvellous, expansive novel from a master of the art. Perhaps his best sci-fi novel, Iain M Banks has written a book of boundless and vivid imagination yet grounded in an almost medieval setting with good... More
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