Her brother's keeper

Iain M. Banks' latest novel in the Culture series, Matter, is a humdinger that spans planets, peoples and societies with astonishing ease. Prince Ferbin of the Sarl is a horse-riding fool of a second son who never expected to come anywhere near the throne. However, after a battle, Ferbin witnesses his father's torture and murder at the hands of his most-trusted general. Ferbin's older brother has also been killed, and Ferbin (who is thought to have been killed himself) realizes his life expectancy has just dropped to zero. Ferbin's younger brother Oramen is now the Prince Regent, so Ferbin turns for help to his other surviving sibling, his sister Djan, now a Special Circumstances agent of the Culture. On Sarl, a nation-state approaching industrial revolution, boys are more valued than girls so Djan was seen as worthless. Now she has a wider perspective on her country and herself—she has even lived as a man for a year. On hearing her father and brother are dead, she heads home. Sarl is not just any backward planet; it is the eighth level of a Shellworld, an alien construction billions of years old which holds many different species besides humans. The Oct, aliens in charge of this Shellworld, believe they are descended from the Shellworld's long-vanished builders. The Oct's belief, combined with an unexpected discovery at an archaeological dig, make the stakes Djan and Ferbin are playing for much higher than Ferbin at least could ever have imagined.

Matter is Banks in top form. His characters—whether human, alien or drone—are spiky, opinionated, diverse, occasionally short-sighted and tragically believable.