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The narrator of Iain Banks's novel, 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, is looking to explain a mystery. He lives with his taciturn father in an isolated house on the north-east coast of Scotland. His father dissembles and has secrets. He has a study, which is always locked; Frank has never seen inside it. At intervals in the narrative he tries the door, hoping that one day his father will forget to lock it. In the way of a fairy-tale or a gothic yarn, we know that we will enter this mysterious chamber before the novel ends.

We are encouraged to believe that there is a logic to Frank's preoccupations. His brother Eric is, he tells us, "crazy" and lucky to have the affection of "somebody sane" - himself. Certainly his obsessions have a quality of pedantic order and rationality. We have reason to think this is copied from his father, who measures everything and sticks labels to household objects, recording their dimensions. The Wasp Factory itself, we eventually find out, is an elaborately constructed mechanism. Fashioned from a giant clock face that Frank has discovered on the town dump, it is a precise network of tiny passages down which captive wasps must crawl to various kinds of death. Their fates predict those of the novel's characters.

Frank seems to know that we need explanations for his odder comments. Lamenting the fact that he is "chubby", and not "dark and menacing" as he would like to look, he remarks regretfully: "Looking at me, you'd never guess I'd killed three people. It isn't fair." When he first mentions his half-brother Eric, he adds, without further explanation, "to whom such an unpleasant thing happened". These puzzles will be explained. But we must also decipher what he takes for granted. Piecing together the story of his mother's brief return, when he was three years old, from details dropped by his father, he says: "I can't remember anything about it at all, just as I can't remember anything before the age of three. But then, of course, I have my own good reasons for that." "Of course": as if the narrator were speaking to someone who knows just what he means. What are the reasons?

Types of books A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of paper, parchment, or other material, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf, and each side of a leaf is called a page. A book produced in electronic format is known as an e-book. Books may also refer to a literature work, or a main division of such a work. In library and information science, a book is called a monograph, to distinguish it from serial periodicals such as magazines, journals or newspapers. The body of all written works including books is literature. In novels, a book may be divided into several large sections, also called books (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, etc). A lover of books is usually referred to as a bibliophile, a bibliophilist, or a philobiblist, or, more informally, a bookworm. A store where books are bought and sold is a bookstore or bookshop. Books can also be borrowed from libraries or obtained for reading through the practice of BookCrossing.