Literature
Iain Banks, Laura Esquivel, Hermann Hesse, Antonio Skármeta

Iain Banks

The Culture FAQ, Culture Shock

	The Wasp Factory (1984) - A simple tale about a kid on a remote Scottish island bumping off various relatives just for kicks. It's something like Lord of the Flies crossed with Shallow Grave.
	The Bridge - The Kafkaesque dreams of a man in a coma. The action begins on a "fucking great bridge" from where we follow his strange journey to remember his previous life and find his identity again.
	The Player of Games (1988) - A Culture novel about a whole society organised around the playing of one very dangerous game.
	Canal Dreams (1989) - Hisako Onoda travels through the Panama Canal due to her fear of flying.  However, Panama is in the throes of civil war and her tanker is subsequently captured.
	The Crow Road - A sprawling epic of a family saga which delves into murky secrets from long ago.
	Feersum Endjinn (1994) - An SF account of life on a future Earth where the population lives inside a very big castle.
	Excession (1996) - A Culture novel about the reappearance of an alien artifact.  The various species around it clash in a race to make contact.

 

Laura Esquivel

Laura Esquivel on "Like Water for Chocolate"

Como agua para chocolate (1989) - Its subtitle is "a novel in monthly instalments, with recipes, romances and home-made remedies". The sensual and sad story about a woman who is cursed from the start to never marry and to never have children. We follow the story of her life during the revolution on the Northern frontier of Mexico. Never once does the spirit of the lead character falter or the pace of the novel slow. The recipes are also pretty good.

 

Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse's Nobel Prize, Creative Quotations from Hermann Hesse

	Demian (1919) - The story of a man who has the mark of Cain and strives throughout his life to find a purpose.
	Siddhartha (1922) - Possibly the best known of Hesse's books, as it tells the story of Buddha, from childhood up to being a guy sitting under a tree and contemplating the universe. Told in an engrossing and contemplative way.
	The Journey to the East (1932) - An updated Canterbury Tales, this is about a secret order of travellers who have all kinds of ancient skills who go on a pilgrimage to the East. A short book with a lot to say.
	The Glass Bead Game (1943) - Tells the story of one man's entire existence, his life story, his historical context, his creative output and his thoughts on his place in the world.

 

Antonio Skármeta

Thoughts on Il Postino, Description of No pasó nada

	No pasó nada (1980) - Skármeta was exiled from Chile to Germany during Pinochet's régime and wrote a book about the experience from the viewpoint of an adolescent boy. The book talks about the problems of growing up in a foreign country, scoring a few political points along the way through the naïve way Lucho, the main character, talks about his homeland.
	El cartero de Neruda (1986) - is Skármeta's tribute to Chile's national poet Pablo Neruda. This fictionalised account of an acquaintance between Neruda and his postman was transposed to Italy by Michael Radford for the film Il Postino in 1995.