Frank lives in a world of private rituals, some of which involve torturing animals, and has committed several murders. The narrator is the 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, who lives with his taciturn father in an isolated house on the north-east coast of Scotland. His first published novel, The Wasp Factory, appeared in 1984, when he was 30 years old, though it had been rejected by six publishers before being accepted by Macmillan. There can have been few novelists of recent years who were more aware of what their readers thought of their books there is a frequent sense in his novels of an author teasing, testing and replying to a readership with which he was pretty familiar. Particularly in his later years, he frequently projected his thoughts via the internet. It was also characteristic in another way: Banks had a large web-attentive readership who liked to follow his latest reflections as well as his writings. The announcement was typically candid and rueful. On 3 April he announced on his website that he had inoperable gall bladder cancer, giving him, at most, a year to live. The writer Iain Banks, who has died aged 59, had already prepared his many admirers for his death.
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