Look to Windward signed by Iain M Banks first edition 2000

London: Orbit, 2000
 
8vo., black publisher’s boards lettered in bronze along spine, with publisher’s device to foot; in the original unclipped dust jacket (£16.99) with an illustration by Mark Salwowski, and a photograph of the author to the lower flap; black endpapers; pp. [xi], 2-357, [i]; slightly pushed to spine tips; a couple of small white marks to outer edges of boards; light spotting to fore-edge; near-fine, still, the defects minor; jacket essentially fine, with a little rubbing to the upper edge, and a tiny amount of lifting to the laminate. 
 
First edition, boldly signed by the author to the title page.   
 
Banks’ sixth novel to feature The Culture, an interstellar post-scarcity civilisation, first introduced by him in Consider Phlebas (1987), of which Look to Windward can be seen as a loose sequel. Both titles are derived directly from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: 
 
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
- IV. Death by Water
 
The plot centres around a 'Chelgrian' on a suicide mission to destroy a Culture world in revenge for the genocide of billions of his own people.