Against A Dark Background [Paperback]

Imaginatively brilliant. (Daily Mail )

There is now no British SF wirter to whose work I look forward to with greater keenness. (The Times )

Banks ain't kidding. He warned you up front that this is a dark novel (Norman Spinrad )

Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary breadth (The New York Review of Science Fiction )

Sharrow was once the leader of a personality-attuned combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the civilisation based around the planet Golter. Now she is hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes that she is the last obstacle before the faith's apotheosis, and her only hope of escape is to find the last of the apocalyptically powerful Lazy Guns before the Huhsz find her. Her journey through the exotic Golterian system is a destructive and savage odyssey into her past, and that of her family and of the system itself.

Praise for Iain M. Banks

‘There is now no British SF writer to whose work I look forward to with such keenness’ THE TIMES

‘Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary breadth’ THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION

‘Poetic, humorous, baffling, terrifying, sexy - the books of Iain M. Banks are all these things and more’ NME

‘Banks is a phenomenon: the wildly successful, fearlessly creative author of brilliant and disturbing non-genre novels, he’s equally at home writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance’ WILLIAM GIBSON

Also by Iain M. Banks

Consider Phlebas The Player of Games Use of Weapons The State of the Art Feersum Endjinn Excession Inversions Look to Windward

Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, THE WASP FACTORY, in 1984. He has since gained enormous popular and critical acclaim for both his mainstream and his science fiction novels.