Stonemouth

The flower of Scotland’s more than a wee bit wilted from drink and recreational drugs in this violent, funny, coming-of-age explosion from veteran Scottish novelist Banks (The Crow Road) set in moderately affluent Stonemouth, near Aberdeen. Some noxious native weeds, like the Murstons, a local crime family, are threatening to choke off narrator Stewart Gilmour now that he’s returned after five years to pay his last respects to the clan’s departed patriarch, Joe. Stu also has unfinished business with Ellie Murston, the girl he loves but left at the altar after the disastrous, hilarious disclosure of his boozy, coked-up pre-marriage fling. Stunning descriptions of coastal Scotland alternate with the rain-soaked violence of Ellie’s brothers and Stu’s painful flashbacks to his youth. His memories help him understand that beneath the “flash-hate” he’s encountering, there’s “something hurt and pathetic and raging.” Banks ends by hopefully assuring us that even a land sapped by corrupt compromise and the “new orthodoxy” of materialism can bloom again. Agent: Kate Hibbert, Little, Brown U.K. (Nov.)