The Wasp Factory
By Iain Banks
Hachette £16.99
7 hours

Iain Banks’s brilliant, spectacularly macabre 1984 debut, now firmly established as a cult classic, is a tricky book to convert to the audio format. To give a voice to its 17-year-old narrator Frank Cauldhame – a sadistic, ritualistically violent, self-confessed multiple murderer – is no easy task. Thankfully, this new, unabridged recording offers a credible adaptation.

Stage actor Peter Kenny injects just the right amount of restrained malice into Frank’s account of himself. He draws the reader into the feral adolescent’s unforgettable world on a remote Scottish island, where he maims animals and awaits the return of his psychotic brother from a mental hospital. A downside is Kenny’s clipped, Scottish-newsreader-style pronunciation, which is overly genteel.