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Stonemouth is Iain Banks's 2012 novel (published under his non-M byline, his literary fiction name), set in a fictional northeast Scottish town and narrated by Stewart Gilmour, a London-based lighting designer returning home for a funeral five years after the wedding that ruined his life. The town's two organized-crime families are still angry. So is the woman he was supposed to marry. The novel is six days of him trying to walk through the consequences of what he did at twenty-two.
Banks is in his late-career social-novel register here, closer to The Crow Road and The Steep Approach to Garbadale than to the Culture novels. The prose is patient, the Scottish coastal-town atmosphere is excellent, and the long flashback structure earns its slow disclosure. The two crime families are sharply drawn without becoming genre-novel obstacles; they are more like specific psychological pressures with bad histories.
Recommended for fans of Iain Banks's literary fiction, readers who liked The Crow Road, and anyone looking for books like Stonemouth in the prodigal-son-returns-home tradition (David Nicholls's One Day, Maggie O'Farrell's After You'd Gone). Four stars, and one of the better late novels from a writer we lost too early.
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