Showing results by author "Martin Amis" in All Categories

The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing who is intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts; or the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch. As Nicola leads her suitors towards the precipice, London--and, indeed, the whole world--seems to shamble after them in a corrosively funny novel of complexity and morality.

The year is 1970, and it's a long, hot summer. In a castle on a mountainside in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on a sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing - 20 years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel - is struggling to twist feminism and women's ascendency toward his own ends.

Newly reissued for the modern listener, Martin Amis’s Success is “a terrifying, painfully funny, Swiftian exercise in moral disgust” (The Observer). Foster brothers Terence Service and Gregory Riding could not be more different from one another—Terry “a quivering condom of neurosis and...

This novel had its birth in the death of Martin Amis's closest friend, the incomparable Christopher Hitchens, and it is within that profound and sprawling friendship that Inside Story unfurls. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic entanglements and the...

Martin Amis first tackled the Holocaust in 1991 with his bestselling novel Time's Arrow. He returns again to the Shoah with this astonishing portrayal of life in "the zone of interest," or "kat zet"—the Nazis' euphemism for Auschwitz. The narrative rotates among three main characters: Paul Doll, the crass, drunken camp commandant; Thomsen, nephew of Hitler's private secretary, in love with Doll's wife; and Szmul, one of the Jewish prisoners charged with disposing of the bodies.

A haunting, gothic love triangle set in postwar Moscow and an Arctic gulag, where forbidden passion and betrayal shape destinies and echo across decades. House of Meetings is a gothic love story, triangular in form and steeped in darkness. In 1946 Moscow, amid the palpable threat of pogroms, two...

Detective Mike Hoolihan has seen it all. A fifteen-year veteran of the force, she's gone from walking a beat, to robbery, to homicide. But one case—this case—has gotten under her skin. When Jennifer Rockwell, darling of the community and daughter of a respected career cop takes her own life, no one is prepared to believe it. Especially her father, Colonel Tom. Homicide Detective Mike Hoolihan, longtime colleague and friend of Colonel Tom, is ready to "put the case down." Suicide. Closed. Until Colonel Tom asks her to do the one thing any grieving father would ask: take a second look.

Dead Babies, a hilarious Agatha Christie parody and Martin Amis’s second novel, was deemed his “most incendiary” (the BBC). Within the quiet walls of the Appleseed Rectory, a gorgeous five-bedroom, three-story home in rural England, anything goes: the drugs are consumed with gusto, the...

A wry, incisive satire of envy and ambition following a failed novelist’s absurd quest to sabotage his more successful rival—with a new introduction by James Wood. Richard Tull, a failed and disillusioned novelist, seethes with envy as he watches his longtime friend Gwyn Barry, a talentless...

Dr Tod. T. Friendly is living his life in reverse. He wakes on his hospital deathbed and staggers back to a quiet home in suburban America. Growing younger as the years pass, he dumps his lovers before seducing them and mangles his patients before sending them home. The arrow of time has turned...

A riotous, razor-edged satire from one of Britain’s most fearless literary provocateurs. Xan Meo, a disgraced journalist, becomes entangled in a twisted web of violence, betrayal, and media spectacle after a brutal attack leaves him physically and emotionally shattered. Meanwhile, a gangster...

From “one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (Time), Other People is a tale about a woman’s path toward self-actualization. "[Narrator Stephanie] MacGaraidh's performance captures the speech patterns and accents of the despicable characters with chilling clarity...Precise and...

Named one of Time’s 100 best novels in the English language, Money is “savagely hilarious. It risks, it boils with energy . . . it even manages to shock” (The Washington Post). Including a new introduction by Lorrie Moore, author of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home Originally published...

In the brutal, concrete landscape of Diston Town, teenage Des Pepperdine is doing his best to stay invisible—reading poetry, avoiding trouble, and nursing a dangerous secret. But his guardian, Lionel Asbo, is a ferocious presence: a pit bull-breeding, tabloid-devouring career criminal with a...

Martin Amis blends vivid memories, sharp wit, and tender honesty to deliver an unforgettable memoir that explores his relationships with family, personal tragedies, and the absurdities of being known. In Experience, the celebrated novelist Martin Amis steps away from fiction to deliver a sharply...

Lionel Asbo, a terrifying yet weirdly loyal thug (self-named after England's notorious "Anti-Social Behaviour Order"), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine. He provides him with fatherly career advice (always carry a knife, for example) and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls (fed with lots of Tabasco sauce), Internet porn, and all manner of more serious criminality. Des, on the other hand, desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love .

Martin Amis’s first novel, The Rachel Papers, tells the story of Charles Highway and his relationship with his girlfriend in the year before going to university—with a new introduction by Paul Murray. Charles Highway, a bright, egotistical Oxford student and soon-to-be Great Novelist, spends...

There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. House of Meetings is about one such liaison.

It’s the end of the millennium and death is on the horizon. American writer Samson Young absconds to England with a terminal illness and a bad case of writer’s block, his flight across the Atlantic a last-ditch attempt to find a good story before it’s too late. What he discovers, in a dark...

Esta novela demuestra una vez más que a Martin Amis no le tiembla el pulso a la hora de abordar temas controvertidos. Después de la demoledora Lionel Asbo. El estado de Inglaterra, que levantó ampollas por su crudo retrato de lo peor de la sociedad británica, el autor regresa al nazismo y al Holocausto, que ya había tratado en La flecha del tiempo. Y lo hace desde un ángulo cuando menos sorprendente, cediendo la palabra a los verdugos, y sin renunciar a incomodar al lector con ciertos toques de comedia negra.