This is my first book by Banks and it was immediately obvious that he is a master storyteller. Returning to a hometown after an absence can be difficult under the best of circumstances but Stewart Gilmour's exit was under duress so now, five years later, he must face his demons. It certainly wasn't what I expected but the well-drawn characters and a superb portrayal of time and place ensured my appreciation. ( )

nice little romp. ( )

I had previously only read The Crow Road, and this book seemed very familiar in its themes. David Tennant is enjoyable to listen to. ( )

This book should be filed on my shelves with the other romantic thrillers that I love so much (Joan Aiken The Butterfly Picnic and a few more, Mary Stewart Touch Not the Cat and a few more). It's as if Iain Banks heard my pleading for more books like this - and just tossed one off - just for me. It obviously doesn't matter that the 'I' (or eye) of the story is a young man - I get the same delicious satisfaction as the story folds and unfolds. ( )

Once more, we are in Iain Banks' Scotland, with a family reunion leading to an exploration of dark secrets. But unlike The Crow Road or The Steep Approach to Garbadale, this time the gloves are off and the knives are out - which as far as the protagonist Stewart Gilmour is concerned, is very much the problem. Five years before, he was run out of town after an indiscretion outraged the family of his soon-to-be-wife. Unfortunately for Stewart, that family is one of the two who run things in his home town, on the north-east coast of Scotland. And when matters don't meet with their approval, things can get broken. Only fingers, if you're lucky.

Now Stewart has come back for the funeral of the family patriarch. Old wounds may get reopened. New wounds may be inflicted. The problem for Stewart is how to emerge from the weekend of the funeral alive.

Unlike many other Iain Banks novels, this one is comparatively light on humour. The setting is described vividly; small-town Scotland has rarely been so well depicted. Banks grew up on the Scottish east coast but it rarely features in his novels. As we have come to expect, much of the story is told in flashback, following Stewart from his schooldays in the mid-1980s growing up alongside the powerful families of the town to the action of the novel at age 25.

The character painting is quite rich; Stewart's contemporaries in the town of Stonemouth are a realistic bunch, down to the cameo appearances; we mostly see Stewart, his best mate Fergus, and the Murston family who the story centres around; Joe the patriarch, his son Don and his four sons (the muscle behind the family firm) and his two daughters, Grier and Ellie, the wronged party in the family scandal. For a character of such importance, we see little of Ellie until the last third of the novel (and with good reason; Stewart has been given clear warnings about what might happen to him were he to think about trying to get too close to Ellie over the weekend). But once Ellie takes her own decisions about that, she becomes a major character despite what her family think she ought to do. That Ellie takes control of the situation only makes matters worse.

Stewart has spent his five years' exile from home building a career; Banks shows us very clearly how it feels to go back to a previous life after making a new life somewhere else. Stonemouth is probably one of the most realistic of Ian Banks' novels. ( )