The Business.

By Iain Banks

ISBN: 9780743200158

Printed: 1999

Publisher: Little Brown. London

Dimensions 17 × 24 × 4 cm
Language

Language: English

Size (cminches): 17 x 24 x 4

£16.00
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Item information

Description

In the original dustsheet. Black cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

  • F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

The Business is a nearly omnipotent and infinitely discreet transglobal organization whose origins predate the Christian Church, if not the Roman Empire (which the Business actually owned for sixty-six days). Financially transparent, internally democratic, and morally dispassionate, the actual business of the Business seems-even to Kate Telman, a senior executive-to be vague to the point of invisibility. Counted among its vast riches are a book of Leonardo cartoons, dozens of Michelangelo’s pornographic paintings, and several sets of Crown Jewels. All it lacks is a certain clout in politics, an arena that the Business has avoided for centuries but that has suddenly become of vital importance. No longer satisfied with its permanent base in Antarctica and its fortified Swiss headquarters, the Business is angling to buy its own nation in order to take a seat at the United Nations. Kate is the perfect candidate to help the Business realize its most ambitious goal: She was plucked at age eight from a bleak urban slum and groomed for membership among the Business’s elite, and her personal and professional loyalties chart a single path. She has risen rapidly through the ranks, achieving a reputation as not only the firm’s smartest and most beautiful employee but also its foremost expert on emerging technologies. While her loyalty never falters, as she travels the globe at the behest of her enigmatic employer she is forced to peel away layers of emotional insulation and to reassess the assumptions of a lifetime. To take control of her future, she must learn to do the Business. The Times of London has proclaimed Iain Banks “the most imaginative British novelist of his generation.” An instant number-one bestseller in England, The Business ominously imagines the ubiquitous multinational corporations of our millennial present, and the cunning with which they manipulate and determine our economy and culture.

Reviews:

  • “Sunday Express” (London) Imagination, wit and complexity are Banks’s hallmarks and The Business is no exception.
  • “The Guardian” One of his most assured performances yet….A highly inventive piece of work, amusing and sinister by turns.

  • “The Independent” (London) The Business is written with enormous energy, crunchy wit and more curves than an Alpine road.

  • “The Scotsman” To most of us, the world of international high finance is a mysterious domain, full of grey men in grey suits. But Iain Banks’s biting satire cuts through the fog….The Business is human comedy, entertainment with a serious, satirical intent.

  • “The Times” (London) The Business is a classic Banks invention.

The Author, Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the original publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, recently selected in a British poll as one of the top 100 novels of the century. Since then he has gained enormous popular and critical acclaim with further works of fiction and, as Iain M. Banks, science fiction. He lives in Scotland.

 

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