Shelfology Book Pairing

by Iain Banks

'One of the most brilliant first novels I have come across' Telegraph 'One of the top 100 novels of the century' Independent 'Brilliant...irresistible...compelling' New York Times 'Macabre, bizarre, and impossible to put down' Financial Times 'Read it if you dare' Daily Express The Wasp Factory is a bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath - one of the most infamous of contemporary Scottish novels. 'Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.' Enter - if you can bear it - the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least.

by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy plumbs the depths of human degradation in Child of God, his most brutally violent, shocking work. From the author of Blood Meridian and The Road.1960s, Tennessee. Lester Ballard is a violent, solitary and introverted young backwoodsman, dispossessed on his ancestral land. Homeless, indulging in voyeurism, he is accused of rape.When he is released from jail, he begins to haunt the hilly landscape - preying upon its population, unleashing his impulse for sexualised violence.Commonplace humanity becomes grotesque and, as the story hurtles toward its unforgettable conclusion, McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with empathy and lyricism.'A powerful and talented writer, able to elicit compassion for his protagonist however terrible his action' - Sunday TimesPraise for Cormac McCarthy:'McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute' - Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' - Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series'n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' - Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain