New Releases by Iain Banks

A beautiful, ambitious woman pursues the ultimate prize in a wickedly satirical novel about a highly secretive transglobal organization.

Set in a war-torn country not unlike Bosnia, this internationally bestselling novel concerns a band of soldiers who find refuge in a rural castle.

Who Do "You" Work For? The Business, a nearly omnipotent enterprise, is so infinitely discreet that even its top executives are vague about its actual business. It predates the Christian church and counts among its vast riches dozens of Michelangelo''s pornographic paintings and several sets of Crown jewels. The only thing it lacks is political clout, a problem the Business plans to solve by buying a nation and joining the United Nations. Kate Telman, the Business''s foremost expert on emerging technologies, is chosen to lead the effort. As this beautiful, ambitious American woman pursues the ultimate prize for her highly secretive transglobal employer, Iain Banks -- whom "The Times" of London calls "the most imaginative British novelist of his generation" -- offers a portrait of today''s ubiquitous multinational corporations. Already a bestseller in England, "The Business" paints a picture that is at once wickedly satirical and frighteningly familiar.

A reissue of Iain Banks'' second novel--three separate stories which unfold to come intricately and masterfully together "Her eyes were black, wide as though with some sustained surprise, the skin from their outer corners to her small ears taut. Her lips were pale, and nearly too full for her small mouth, like something bled but bruised. He had never seen anyone or anything quite so beautiful in his life." Graham Park is in love, but Sara Fitch is an enigma to him, a creature of almost perverse mystery. Steven Grout is paranoid, and with justice. He knows that They are out to get him, and They are. Quiss, insecure in his fabulous if ramshackle castle, is forced to play interminable impossible games. The solution to the oldest of all paradoxical riddles will release him, but he must find an answer before he knows the question. Park, Grout, Quiss--no trio could be further apart, but their separate courses are set for collision.

Count Sessine is about to die for the very last time ... Chief Scientist Gadfium is about to receive the mysterious message she has been waiting for from the Plain of Sliding Stones ... And Bascule the Teller, in search of an ant, is about to enter the chaos of the crypt ... And everything is about to change ... For this is the time of the encroachment and, although the dimming sun still shines on the vast, towering walls of Serehfa Fastness, the end is close at hand. The King knows it, his closest advisers know it, yet sill they prosecute the war against the clan Engineers with increasing savagery. The crypt knows it too; so an emissary has been sent, an emissary who holds the key to all their futures.

Diplomat Byr Genar-Hofoen has been selected by the Culture to undertake a delicate and dangerous mission. He is to investigate a 2,500-year-old mystery: the sudden disappearance of a star fifty times older than the universe itself. There is only one way to solve the problem. He has to steal the soul of the long-dead starship captain who first encountered the star, and convince her to be reborn. What he discovers could lead the universe into an age of peace, or to the brink of annihilation.