Iain M. Banks

Lady Sharrow was once the fearless leader of a combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the vicinity of the planet Golter. Now she is hunted by the Huhsz - a religious cult hellbent on assassinating her - and her only hope of escape is to ­find the last of the apocalyptically powerful Lazy Guns before the Huhsz track her down.

Her journey through the exotic Golterian system is a destructive and savage odyssey into her past, and that of her family and of the system itself.

Lieutenant Commander Vyr Cossont is suspected of involvement after the Regimental High Command is destroyed, as they prepared to go to a new level of existence called Sublime. Now she must find a nine-thousand-year-old man to clear her name.

It was one of the less glorious incidents of a long-ago war. It led to the destruction of two suns and the billions of lives they supported. Now, 800 years later, the light from the first of those ancient mistakes has reached the Culture Orbital, Masaq. The light from the second may not.

Cheradenine Zakalwe was one of Special Circumstances' foremost agents. The woman known as Diziet Sma had plucked him from obscurity and pushed him towards his present eminence. The drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw had once saved the woman's life and believed the man to be a lost cause. But not even its machine could see the horrors in his past.