Martin Amis

Charles Highway, a precociously intelligent and highly sexed teenager, is determined to sleep with an older woman before he turns twenty. Rachel fits the bill perfectly and Charles plans his seduction meticulously, sets the scene with infinite care - but it doesn't come off quite as Charles expects...

Charles Highway, a precociously intelligent and highly sexed teenager, is determined to sleep with an older woman before he turns twenty. Rachel fits the bill perfectly and Charles plans his seduction meticulously, setting the scene with infinite care - but it doesn't come off quite as expected.

Amidst the horrors of Auschwitz, German officer, Angelus Thomsen, has found love. As Thomsen and Dollâ??s wife pursue their passion â?? the gears of Nazi Germanyâ??s Final Solution grinding around them â?? Doll is riven by suspicion.

Meanwhile, Des desires nothing more than books, a girl to love and to steer clear Uncle Liâ??s psychotic pitbulls, Joe and Jeff. â??One of Amis's funniest novelsâ?? New Yorkerâ??A book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagelyâ?? Observer

It's Friday at the Appleseed Rectory, and hosted by Quentin Villers and Celia, a weekend house-party is in full swing. Who's popping what? Who's screwing Lucy? Can they take the pace? Friday melts into Saturday, Saturday spirals into Sunday.

Novelists have noticed that contemporary reality keeps outdoing their imaginations. Yet there is still the obligation to attempt a reading of the present and the very near future. This work serves as an example of how the novel, or more particularly the comic novel, can respond to this transformation.

Containing a 100-page study of Stalin - Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible - Amis's memoir addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought, that is the indulgence of Communism by intellectuals of the West.

Trapped in his body from grave to cradle, Friendlyââ?¬â?¢s consciousness can only watch as he struggles to make sense of the good doctorââ?¬â?¢s most ambitious project yet ââ?¬â?? the final solution. SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE'Amis's most daring and ambitious novel' Daily Telegraph

A selection of reviews and essays by Martin Amis, written over the past quarter-century. It contains pieces on a wide range of writers, from Cervantes to John Updike, and covers such subjects as chess, nuclear weapons, masculinity, Andy Warhol, Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher.

In this remarkable work of autobiography, the son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis explores his relationship with his father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life, including the final one of his death.

In Martin Amis's short stories whole worlds are created - or inverted. in 'Career Move', screenplay writers submit their works to little magazines, while poets are flown first-class to Los Angeles; And in 'The Coincidence of the Arts' an English baronet becomes entangled with an African-American chess hustler.

A wickedly funny, grotesquely exaggerated portrait of modern Britain, as seen through the rise of one of Amis's most outrageous characters. 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 gift for violence and a hatred of books. When Lionel wins the lottery from inside prison and becomes an overnight millionaire, Des is dragged along for the ride, caught between survival, loyalty, and the faint hope of something better. With savage humor and a Dickensian eye for the grotesque, Lionel Asbo: State of England captures a nation enthralled by celebrity and excess. It's a darkly comic portrait of a young man coming of age in a culture that confuses notoriety with success, and a meditation on the quiet courage it takes to resist chaos from within your own home.

A provocative meditation on sex, power, and the long shadow of the sexual revolution. In the heat-soaked summer of 1970, twenty-year-old Keith Nearing, a literature-obsessed student, navigates the confusing new freedoms of love and lust during a holiday in an Italian castle. Surrounded by beautiful women, political awakenings, and shifting gender roles, Keith becomes both participant in and bewildered observer of a cultural revolution whose consequences he--and the novel--are still reckoning with decades later. With his characteristic wit, Martin Amis examines the personal fallout of social upheaval, casting a retrospective eye on a moment when liberation promised everything and delivered something far more complicated. The Pregnant Widow is a novel about the unfinished business of the twentieth century--a reckoning with the promises of feminism, the delusions of youth, and the way history embeds itself in the body.

A powerful, urgent, and unflinching exploration of terror, power, and the fragile line between security and freedom in a post-9/11 world. In this collection of essays, Martin Amis explores the world transformed by the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Beyond examining the nature of terrorism and the ideology behind jihadism, Amis delivers scathing critiques of Western governments' responses, questioning their motives, missteps, and the often troubling balance between security and liberty. His writing navigates the difficult terrain between condemnation and understanding, exposing the complexities of guilt, fear, and power in a world reshaped by terror. With unflinching honesty, Amis grapples with the complexities of blame, the psychology of violence, and the global consequences of a world irrevocably altered by extremism. Measured yet urgent, The Second Plane reflects a deep unease with the clash between civilization and barbarism, and the challenge of preserving humanity in an age marked by terror.

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 with delusions of grandeur orchestrates chaos beneath the surface, and the monarchy itself teeters under the weight of scandal and farce. Martin Amis's novel is a dizzying ride through toxic masculinity, tabloid obsession, and the brutal theater of power and celebrity. With prose that crackles with swagger and menace, Yellow Dog confronts a society addicted to spectacle and decay. It's a savage portrait of a culture where the line between predator and prey is dangerously blurred. Yellow Dog is a novel not of redemption, but of confrontation--and a vision of contemporary Britain unraveling at the seams.

Martin Amis, the renowned author of Money and London Fields, presents a collection of essays on the "Moronic Inferno," aka the United States of America. In this spirited, hilarious, luminous collection of twenty-six essays, Martin Amis tackles the great big moronic inferno of the United States of America. Filled with profiles of prolific American figures--such as writers like Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow; celebrities like Hugh Hefner; and filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and Brian de Palma--The Moronic Inferno expertly probes the American consciousness.

A powerful collection of five short stories about the dangers of nuclear warfare, from the renowned author of Money and London Fields.An ex-circus strongman meets his own personal holocaust and "Einsteinian" destiny; maximum boredom and minimum lovemaking are advised in a 2020 epidemic; a virulent new strain of schizophrenia overwhelms the young son of a "father of the nuclear age"; and an immortal being reminisces on the creation--and destruction--of the earth and humankind. In Einstein's Monsters, an inventive collection of linked stories, Martin Amis presents a grotesque, inspired, unsettling vision of a world terrorized by the unthinkable but nonetheless urgent threat of nuclear warfare.

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 brothers and a Jewish girl are drawn together in a fateful, tangled dance of desire and rivalry. Their destinies entwine further in the desolate Norlag labor camp, buried above the Arctic Circle, where an enigmatic encounter in the House of Meetings will leave indelible marks on all three. What begins as a brief, forbidden tryst lingers long after the brothers' release, haunting their every step. For the narrator, the sole survivor of this tragic triangle, the echoes of that night continue to reverberate into the new century. As he writes to his American stepdaughter, Venus, his tale becomes one of love, betrayal, and the shadows that refuse to fade. Dark, unsettling, and endlessly unpredictable, House of Meetings is a work of staggering intimacy and far-reaching consequences. Martin Amis once again proves himself a master of the eerie and the profound.

A blistering blend of history and political reckoning, Koba the Dread is Martin Amis's searing indictment of Stalinist terror and the Western intellectuals who turned a blind eye. A masterful fusion of personal reflection, historical narrative, and searing political insight, Koba the Dread is the worthy successor to Martin Amis's acclaimed memoir Experience. In Koba the Dread, Amis dissects the seductive yet blood-soaked allure of Communism, a belief system that captivated and stained the twentieth century. With ruthless clarity, he tackles the most glaring hypocrisy of Western intellectuals: their indulgence in a brutal ideology that, at its core, crushed millions of lives. Amid personal revelations and familial loss, Amis delivers perhaps the most uncompromising pages ever written about Stalin--Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible--a portrait of a man whose cruelty was matched only by his chilling disregard for human suffering. Amis's own father, Kingsley, once a loyal Comintern acolyte, and his close association with Robert Conquest, the distinguished Sovietologist who helped unravel the USSR's facade, serve as the dark backdrop to this memoir. These connections, fraught with irony and tragedy, add a chilling layer to the personal history Amis dissects with surgical precision. In the face of Stalin's infamous aphorism--that the death of one is a tragedy, while the death of millions is a mere statistic--Amis offers a scathing rebuttal. Koba the Dread is not just an exploration of Soviet terror; it is a deeply personal and caustic counterpoint to the moral apathy that allowed such horrors to flourish.

An expansive and incisive collection of essays and reportage from one of England's celebrated writers.Martin Amis has spent decades turning his forensic intellect and inimitable prose toward the absurdities, vanities, and occasional triumphs of modern life. In The Rub of Time, a collection of his sharpest nonfiction from over twenty years, he trains his gaze on politics, literature, sports, and the spectacle of celebrity with a wit as lethal as it is precise. Here, Amis dissects the rise of Donald Trump with mordant amusement, capturing the theatrical bluster and ominous undertones of American politics. He revisits his literary titans, Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, parsing their genius with the awe of a disciple and the rigor of a peer. His sportswriting crackles with the same energy, whether reflecting on the fleeting prime of his own athleticism or the strange poetry of competition. From the war on terror to Brexit, from the pitfalls of fame to the pleasures of the written word, Amis blends personal reflection with razor-sharp cultural critique, always with his signature mix of erudition and dark comedy. Brimming with linguistic fireworks and featuring new commentary from the author, The Rub of Time is Amis at his most incisive, irreverent, and unmissable.