Iain Banks reveals brutal impact of cancer in final book In one passage revealed in The Sunday Times, Kit says: "I know Guy's cancer is not contagious. You can't catch it off him. That's the thing about cancer. It's all yours - it's entirely, perfectly personalised. The cause might have come from outside, like carcinogens in tobacco smoke, but that just triggered the reaction in your cells. In that sense the fatal cancer is an unwilled suicide where, initially at least, one small part of the body has taken a decision which will lead to the death of the rest. Cancer feels like betrayal. Guy's frustration with the current state of Britain is also detailed, as he turns his ire on the Daily Mail, climate-change deniers and "this island's pathetic, grovelling population of celebrity-obsessed, superficially fixated wankers." Banks announced on his website that he was dying from cancer in April. He wrote: "It started in my gall bladder, has infected both lobes of my liver and probably also my pancreas and some lymph nodes, plus one tumour is massed around a group of major blood vessels in the same volume, effectively ruling out any chance of surgery to remove the tumours either in the short or long term. The bottom line, now, I'm afraid, is that as a late stage gall bladder cancer patient, I'm expected to live for 'several months' and it's extremely unlikely I'll live beyond a year. So it looks like my latest novel, The Quarry, will be my last. Praising the "professionalism" of the NHS, he said that a course of chemotherapy might extend his life a little further, but that he would withdraw from all planned public engagements. He added that he had asked his partner Adele "if she will do me the honour of becoming my widow" - an offer she accepted.