I bought this book on the week of release and I also saw Banks reading from it at the Ilkley Literary Festival and got him to sign this copy. He basically admitted that the central character/premise was an excuse for him to write his left wing liberal rants that he restrains himself from putting in his other books with a mob-mistress thrown in to make sure there’s a plot, and a fairly original how-to-deal-with-holocaust-deniers sub plot.

And it was indeed the rants and the sub plot that I enjoyed the most. A lot of the rants I felt I could have written myself and were very close to my personal opinion, which made me wonder how much Banks’s earlier work had influenced me...

fobbed off onto friend in aberdeen city.