The Wasp Factory

by Iain Banks

An interesting, at times shocking, book about a teenager living in his own little world on an island in Scotland. Not necessarily for the faint hearted, there's quite some violence, I didn't find it excessively graphic. There is also an interesting twist at the end.

There is no great revelation at the end tying everything together. It's just a story of a boy on an island with no big meaning beyond the story. It does however cover some interesting topics around teenagers, isolation and living in their own world.

The book is much easier to read than the Culture series from the same author (under his other name "Iain M Banks"). So I got through the book in about three days and was able to follow the entire story without getting lost. The same is rarely true of the Culture series for me.