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Martin Amis, 1949-2023

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Where to start reading Martin Amis

London Fields

She knows she will be murdered. She believes she has chosen the man who will do it. 
 
Samson Young arrives in 1980s London ill, broke, and determined to write one last novel. In a decaying city thick with corruption and appetite, he meets Nicola Six, a woman who is certain she will be killed on her thirty-fifth birthday. 
 
Nicola is convinced the murderer will be one of two men already orbiting her. Keith Talent, volatile and reckless, and Guy Clinch, wealthy and naïve, are drawn into her confidence and her manipulation. She tests them both, as if narrowing the field. 
 
Samson inserts himself into Nicola’s circle, observing her calculation and encouraging the drama. Convinced he is documenting fate rather than shaping it, he begins to depend on the murder for the meaning of his book. 
 
'A true story, a murder story, a love story and a thriller bursting with humour, sex and often dazzling language' Independent

I love reading novels about the city but this is my favourite. It manages to incorporate the seedy and the middle class Notting Hill side of the capital, all in one glorious unputdownable novel

Martin Amis's most ambitious, intelligent and nourishing novel to date... Keith Talent is a brilliant comic creation...as a fictional minor crook, he is in the major league, lying and cheating on the scale of Greene's Pinkie Brown and Saul Bellow's Rinaldo Cantabile

An electrifying writer who likes to shock his fans and share his sharply contemporary concerns... Amis is a maddening master you need to read - the best of his generation

London Fields, its pastoral title savagely inappropriate to its inner-city setting, vibrates, like all Amis's work, with the force fields of sinister, destructive energies. At the core of its surreal fable are four figures locked in lethal alignment

A darkly comic web around her in a London rife with greed, deceit and desire

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY RACHEL CUSK 
 
Writer, Samson Young, is staring death in the face, and not only his own. 
 
Void of ideas and on the verge of terminal decline, Samson’s dash to a decaying, degenerate London has brought him through the doors of the Black Cross pub and into a murder story just waiting to be narrated. 
 
At its centre is the mesmeric, doomed Nicola Six, destined to be murdered on her 35th birthday. Around her: the disreputable men who might yet turn out to be her killer. All Samson has to do is to write Nicola’s story as it happens, and savour in this one last gift that life has granted him. 
 
'A true story, a murder story, a love story and a thriller bursting with humour, sex and often dazzling language' Independent

The Information

Martin Amis (Author) Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century – in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience – he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023. James Wood (Introducer) Born in Durham in 1965, James Wood has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2007. He was the chief literary critic at the Guardian from 1992 to 1995, and a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995 to 2007. His books include How Fiction Works, which has been translated into fifteen languages.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JAMES WOOD 
 
Once close friends, writers Gwyn Barry and Richard Tull now find themselves in fierce competition. 
 
While Tull has spiralled into a mire of literary obscurity and belletristic odd jobs, Barry’s atrocious attempts at novels have brought him untold success. Prizes, prestige and wealth abound, and from far below Tull can only watch, stewing in torment. 
 
Until, that is, resentment turns to revenge. Consumed by the question of how one writer can really hurt another, Tull’s quest for an answer will unleash increasingly violent urges on both writers’ lives. 
 
‘A funny, vicious portrait of literary London’ Evening Standard

Money

Martin Amis (Author) Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century – in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience – he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM ANDREW O'HAGAN 
 
John Self is a consumer extraordinaire. 
 
Rolling between London and New York he closes movie deals and spends feverishly, all the while grabbing everything he can to sate his massive appetites: alcohol, tobacco, pills, pornography and mountains of junk food. But John's excesses haven't gone un-noted. Menaced by a phone stalker, his high-wire, hoggish lifestyle is about to bring him face-to-face with the secret of his success. 
 
'Turbo-charged with savage humour from first to last page... A voice that mesmerised a generation' Guardian

The Zone of Interest

Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century &ndash; in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience &ndash; he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.

THE NOVEL THAT INSPIRED THE OSCAR WINNING FILM 
 
Amidst the horrors of Auschwitz, German officer, Angelus Thomsen, has found love. 
 
But unfortunately for Thomsen, the object of his affection is already married to his camp commandant, Paul Doll. 
 
As Thomsen and Doll&rsquo;s wife pursue their passion &ndash; the gears of Nazi Germany&rsquo;s Final Solution grinding around them &ndash; Doll is riven by suspicion. With his dignity in disrepute and his reputation on the line, Doll must take matters into his own hands and bring order back to the chaos that reigns around him. 
 
&lsquo;It is exceptionally brave&hellip;. Shakespearean&hellip;. It&rsquo;s exciting; it&rsquo;s alive; it&rsquo;s more than slightly mad. As the title suggests, it is dreadfully interesting.&rsquo; Sunday Times

The Rachel Papers

50th Anniversary Edition

Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century – in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience – he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CLAIRE LOWDON 
 
Charles Highway is every mother's worst nightmare. 
 
Precociously intelligent, mercilessly manipulative and highly sexed, Charles devotes the last of his teenage years to bedding girls and evading the half-arsed overtures of his distant parents. That is, until, he meets the aloof, wildly unattainable, Rachel. 
 
As Charles's twentieth birthday - and the Oxford entrance exams - loom, his plans for seducing Rachel will draw him into a private collection of obsessional notes and observations: the eponymous 'Rachel Papers'. 
 
WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD 
 
'Scurrilous, shameless and very funny' The Times Literary Supplement 
 
'Amis has brought off the feat of satirizing his contemporaries while making them both funny and, in a bizarre way, moving' Peter Ackroyd

Inside Story

A magisterial, inventive and witty modern classic – Amis’ autobiographical novel and arguably his most important masterpiece to date – the companion volume to EXPERIENCE

Warm, generous and deeply moving... This is not only the best book Amis has written in years; it is up there with Money and London Fields as the finest work he's produced.

World-class talent... With the life-giving warmth of his brilliant, generous, sometimes unsparing critical writing... Martin Amis is my favorite living writer and Inside Story is his most beautiful book.

For my generation of fiction writers, Amis has become like a granite headland, a navigational marker for our collective endeavour. And here...are all the reasons we still love him... Inside Story gives us access to a turbulent, flawed but exceptional writing life.

Another work of genius to remind us that he is the best... Amis writes better than anyone. What a book!

One of Britain's greatest living writers... With each sumptuous sentence he proves his credentials... For fans of his work, Inside Story is a victory lap; newcomers will be steered towards his rich back catalogue.

The Mick Jagger of literature... Amis is the most dazzling prose stylist in post-war British fiction.

Amis's prose, as you should know by now, has a rush and a power that sweeps you along like surf: you're never going to get a sentence that isn't pulling its weight... The scene at Hitchens's deathbed affected me more than anything else I can remember reading.

Inside Story gathers just about every weapon in the writer's armoury... Tender...corrosively witty...swaggeringly funny... It exhilarates.

Amis's nonpareil sentences brim with warmth, candour, soul... He has generously laid out this all-you-can-eat Amis buffet. Dig in.

Funny, tender and captivatingly intelligent.

Consistently intelligent and compulsively readable... [Amis] applies his insight and curiosity as a novelist to this stylish and genuine account of his development as a writer. The result reaches the heights of his finest work.

Profoundly moving... If Experience was Amis elucidating the visible events of his life, the one-10th of the iceberg sitting above the waterline, then this book is a dark and tender exploration of the part that lies submerged.

You really feel that in this book you are getting to the heart of one of the most remarkable writers of our time.

[Martin Amis is a] master chronicler of the male condition.

As always with Amis the prose is beautiful, expressive, and precisely engineered... The book is a boundless treasure filled with hilarious anecdotes, heart-wrenching confessions, and eye-opening revelations.

A deeply engaging 'novelised autobiography' that focuses on love and death... Wonderfully readable, rich in the familiar Amis pleasures of wit, insight, and well-formed anecdotes. An intriguing, often brilliant addition to a storied career.

The unexpected gift of Inside Story comes under the heading of "How to Write". Amis reliably provides synaptic pleasure whenever he pauses to give one of his didactic asides about the English language. It would be worth compiling these in a volume to stand alongside Kingsley's The King's English.

In Amis's writing, [there is] that brilliant observational gift for ironies... There are perfectly crafted scenes that capture the creeping shocks of mortality.

It is always a pleasure to read Martin Amis... [Inside Story] is a generous book in sharing so much with its readers... Brilliant.

An account [of Larkin is] written with such empathy and insight that it is truly harrowing... grandly resonant, brilliantly suggestive.

The book's most solemn task is perhaps that of honouring the dead...and this it accomplishes beautifully.

[In Inside Story] humour and illumination flow.

Sad and funny... Utterly compelling on grief.

This is a celebration of his [Amis's] life in all its exuberant brilliance and melancholy moments.

[Inside Story displays] compelling insights and observations, courage, tenderness; and above all, an undimmed passion for the written word.

Fascinating... Martin Amis at his best, and that is very good indeed.

Inside Story is something particular, something unique... the tenor of his writing...about Israel, the Holocaust and 9/11 reveals a different Amis, and is the source of some of the book's best passages.

Moving... Beneath the attention-seeking is a well-loved author who has gone through his cupboards, giving us all that he has.

A defiant and witty testimony to mortality and a tender remembrance of his friends and literary heroes… I’ve been reading and re-reading it this year

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

'Utterly compelling' Guardian 
 
Life...is shapeless, it does not point to and gather round anything, it does not cohere. Artistically, it's dead. Life's dead. 
 
So begins a love letter to life, a resuscitation of sorts, encountering vibrant characters from Saul Bellow, to Philip Larkin to Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard, and to the person who captivated Amis' twenties, the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps. 
 
Amis addresses our burning questions: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die?

a Mystery Story

Other People

A new reissue series of Martin Amis's novels to mark his 70th birthday

For all its savagery - Other People is a funny book - an achievement light years ahead of his earlier novels

Powerful and electrifying... Other People is a metaphysical thriller, Kafka reshot in the style of Psycho

One of the most gifted novelists of his generation

Amis is a force unto himself... There is, quite simply, no one else like him

Other People is "about" a descent into Hell, Hell being "other people" - it's a very strange and impressive performance

'Other People had me purring with pleasure' The Times 
 
Like a ghost or a fugitive, Mary roams through London - pursuing and pursued by memory and forgetting, by the compelling Amy Hide and the charming Mr Wrong... 
 
Martin Amis sustains an unnervingly high degree of suspense as Mary and the reader yearn to grasp what has happened to Mary's past and ponder what its loss has gained her. Unfolding is a metaphysical thriller where jealousy guarded secrets jostle with startling insights. Other People is ambitious and accomplished, heralding for Amis an unexpected new direction as a novelist and for the rest of us an experience not to be missed.

House of Meetings

This novella is the best thing Martin Amis has done in fiction for years: very complex, very forceful, startling in the amount of ground it covers, and densely and intelligently put together

An ambitious feat...the result is brilliant

It is difficult not to be impressed by this compact tour de force... Amis has produced a memorable novel and a memorable protagonist

Unmistakably Amis's best novel since London Fields...a slender, moving novel, streaked with dark comedy

Undeniably, distinctively identifiable, vintage Martin

The novel has a cumulative power and resonates with many reflections about the course of individual destiny in a profoundly cruel universe

This is Amis writing at the pitch he has reached in Money...remarkable

A compelling work of fiction in which learning and imagination are beautifully counterpoised

‘The best thing Martin Amis has done in fiction for years’ Literary Review 
 
 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 is a triangular romance: two brothers fall in love with the same girl, a nineteen-year-old Jewess, in Moscow, which is poised for pogrom in the gap between the war and the death of Stalin. Both brothers are arrested, and their rivalry slowly complicates itself over a decade in the slave camp above the Arctic Circle. 
 
 ‘It is difficult not to be impressed by this compact tour de force’ Observer

Dead Babies

Sparkling might not be the first adjective that springs to mind to describe a novel packed with the concentrated disgust which Dead Babies contains. Nevertheless, Martin Amis's version of the bleak and wrecky future that awaits a sex-and-drug-addicted society is so fizzing with style, so busy with verbal inventiveness, that the adjective is impelled upon one

Viciously funny, at once a hilarious joke and a technical triumph

Six friends are determined to escape for a debauched weekend in the country 
 
Blitzed on uppers, downers, blue movies and bellinis, the six twenty-something friends ensconced at Appleseed Rectory for the weekend are reeling in an hallucinatory haze of sex and seduction. 
 
 But mysterious ‘Johnny’ begins to unsettle the other guests. And as Friday melts into Saturday and Saturday spirals into Sunday and sobriety sets in, the romp descends into something altogether more sinister. 
 
 'It's transfixing - At first it's funny. It teases, exaggerates, deliberates. Then it becomes ferocious, stricken, moving' The Times 
 
 ‘Very funny, extremely clever’ Guardian

Yellow Dog

Martin Amis at his best... Wonderful... Extravagantly funny

[There] are moments of magical vigilance and great emotional delicacy, intimations of a quite different kind of writer that Amis could be, or would be, perhaps, were it not for the demands of his devastating comic gift

Mind tinglingly good... He seems to have guessed what you thought about the world, and then expressed it far better than you ever could... Here is a novel to silence the doubters...Amis has found a subject to match the tessellated polish of his style

'Lucid... Daring... A blissful antidote to the arrhythmic stylelessness of so much contemporary fiction

His humour is a welcome change from the prevailing literary pietism

A consummate stylist...constantly and intensely aware of the language he is using, the medium of his art

Raucously funny, relentlessly fast-paced, delightfully intricate... A marvelous novel, a powerful book, a work of pain and madness and love...a work of seriousness. A work of beauty

'Martin Amis at his best... Wonderful... Extravagantly funny’ Guardian 
 
 
When 'dream husband' Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head-injury, and personality-change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system - one among many to be found in these pages. 
 
We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the 'yellow' journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Royce Traynor, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zizhen; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed 'intrusion' which rivets the world - because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King. 
 
'As funny as Dead Babies, as blackly portentous as London Fields and as satirically on-the-nail as Money' Mail on Sunday

Success

Beautifully constructed to make a coherent, powerful and still fairly unusual statement about changing English society

An instantly recognizable voice, penetrating, loquacious, slightly hysterical, upsetting, rising above the basso pseudo-profundo babble of his competitors like filed fingernails scraping down glass - Martin Amis is a dazzling phrasemaker

Amis pulls off his literary feat with panache

'A terrifying, painfully funny Swiftian exercise in moral disgust' Observer 
 
Smooth-talking, sensual and self-deluded, Gregory Riding leads an existence of formidable foppishness, his days and nights a series of effortless, titillating conquests and tireless sex - sister, employers, acquaintances are but co-stars among a cast of thousands to have passed through his busy bed. Meanwhile, Gregory's foster brother, Terry, has to make do with the leavings as he trawls through life in a miasma of grief, burdened by an unmentionable past and the unlikelihood of ever having a good time in bed. 
 
But when Success swivels her capricious gaze roles are reversed with and the Riding brothers find their lives dramatically changed. 
 
 ‘An instantly recognizable voice, penetrating, loquacious, slightly hysterical, upsetting, rising above the basso pseudo-profundo babble of his competitors like filed fingernails scraping down glass‘ Sunday Times

Night Train

Night Train is both delicate and bruising - a long drawn-out blue note. The book hangs around in the mind like smoke in a jazz club

A virtuoso performance. Deliciously readable, highly polished... Mr Amis has created a quicksilver narrative that grabs the reader and refuses to let go

Night Train pushes the boundaries of noir almost to the edge of darkness

A work of dark romanticism, a tale of possession... prose crackling with wit and invention

Compelling... Night Train is an entertaining take on the American detective novel, a potent cocktail of violence and stylized dialogue flavoured by an unexpected existential twist

Amis is arguably the greatest wordsmith living today, tossing of hundred-dollar words like spent matchsticks, with a scalding wit to go with it. Night Train is a tightly crafted and skilled work

A sharp twist on the noir genre from one of England’s finest fiction writers 
 
'I worked one hundred murders,' says Detective Mike Hoolihan, an American policewoman. 'In my time I have come in on the aftermath of maybe a thousand suspicious deaths, most of which turned out to be suicides, accidentals or plain unattendeds. So I've seen them all: jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, dunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, bursters. But of all the bodies I have ever seen none has stayed with me, in my gut, like the body of Jennifer Rockwell. I say all this because I am part of the story I am going to tell, and I feel the need to give you some idea of where I'm coming from.' 
 
Night Train is a mystery story which lingers in the reader's mind even after Mike Hoolihan declares the case closed. 
 
‘Tough, noir, Chandleresque’ Independent 
 
 ‘Night Train is both delicate and bruising - a long drawn-out blue note. The book hangs around in the mind like smoke in a jazz club’ Telegraph Magazine

Time's Arrow

Amis's backwards world is rigorously imagined. It is a world of pathos and cruel hilarity - but the crux, the test of his vision, is what he does with Auschwitz

The devastatingly sustained black irony stands comparison with Swift's A Modest Proposal. It is, I think, Amis's finest achievement to date

Extraordinary - Ironic inversion is essentially a comic device, but its trickery here yields results that are rigorously grave

An icy, hard read - Amis is at his intriguing, powerful and heedful best

Martin Amis is the author of fourteen novels, the memoir Experience, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction. He lives in New York.

Tod. T. Friendly is living his life backwards. 
 
Doctor Friendly has just died, but after weeks of improving in the hospital, he is sent home to his affable, melting-pot, primary-colour existence in suburban America. 
 
From the fresh-cut lawns of his retirement to the hustle of New York, and then the boat back to war-torn Europe, Friendly carries with him a secret. Trapped in his body from grave to cradle, Friendly’s consciousness can only watch as he struggles to make sense of the good doctor’s most ambitious project yet – the final solution. 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 
 
'Amis's most daring and ambitious novel' Daily Telegraph

State of England

Lionel Asbo

Terrific... Both funny and serious, and (as always wth Amis) very very on-the-money'

The novel is something of a joy...he makes the dreadful funny, the grotesque poetic

It's a Big Mac made from filet mignon… It is a book of lovehate. It is a powershake... A book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely. It is every inch the novel that we all deserve.

The broadest comedy he has ever published… Lionel is a fantastic brute… I laughed a lot. Amis’s delight in the incorrigible is genuinely Dickensian… This is a verbally inventive comedy…to be enjoyed in the same spirit as Little Britain… It’s a hoot

I read the book in a sitting, chortling throughout…with its swaggering prose and undertow of quiet pathos, this book marks a return to something not far short of Amis’s best

He remains one of the most interesting authors we have, not least for continually engaging with those areas in the life of a nation which journalists and politicians tip-toe around

Being an Amis novel it’s not without the odd good joke, and he is, of course, incapable of writing and inelegant line. It’s almost as if he alone can sense both the golden ratio of a sentence, and its perfect rhythm: it’s like he’s Michelangelo and Keith Moon

Full of hilarious set-pieces, wisecracks and wordplay.

Lionel Asbo has just won £139,999,999.50 on the Lottery. 
 
A horribly violent, but horribly unsuccessful criminal, Lionel’s attentions up to now have all been on his nephew, Desmond Pepperdine. He showers him with fatherly advice (‘carry a knife’) and introduces Des to the joys of internet porn. Meanwhile, Des desires nothing more than books, a girl to love and to steer clear Uncle Li’s psychotic pitbulls, Joe and Jeff. 
 
But Lionel’s winnings are not necessarily all good news. For Des has a secret, and its discovery could unleash his uncle’s implacable vengeance. 
 
‘One of Amis's funniest novels’ New Yorker 
 
‘A book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely’ Observer

The Pregnant Widow

No one better understands the cosmic joke that is humanity. Nor is anyone as funny telling it

One of the funniest books I've read in a long time

Read it: it is hilarious, often wonderfully perceptive, uncompromisingly ambitious and written by a great master of the English language

Moving and humane... I love this novel...  It is beautifully achieved, cunningly relaxed, and reveals considerable emotional depth

Amis writes thrillingly well... [The Pregnant Widow] delivers fantastic enjoyment... It is funny, clever and knowing

There is something witty or striking on almost every page

Martin Amis's new novel shows a regathering of his artistic energies

The buzzing sense of fresh, limitless erotic licence is captured brilliantly...he is beginning to write with Old Master assurance on the important subjects... If Amis keeps writing like this about death, he can still prove everyone wrong

‘A phenomenal writer’ Sunday Times 
 
An intoxicating comedy about youth, the 1970s, the sexual revolution and its aftermath. 
 
Summer, 1970. Sex is very much on everyone's mind. 
 
Keith Nearing - a bookish twenty-year-old, in that much disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven - is on holiday and struggling to twist the seventies’s emerging feminism towards his own ends. Torn between three women, his scheming doesn't come off quite as he expects. 
 
'Read it: it is hilarious, often wonderfully perceptive, uncompromisingly ambitious and written by a great master of the English language' Financial Times

An Addict's Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines

Invasion of the Space Invaders

Back in a facsimile edition is Martin Amis’s closet passion project, first published in 1982: a compulsive gamer’s guide to arcades and beating your younger self’s high score

[Invasion of the Space Invaders] has remained one of the great literary curios of the 20th century… Like Updike on golf, or Foster Wallace on tennis, Amis approaches video games with an enthusiast’s glee, deploying pleading prose that seeks to illuminate the subject’s hold on the writer.

A quirky guide to arcade games from Space Invaders to Gorf.

There’s plenty of stylistic fizz and flash on show, as always with Amis… he really does, or did, know his video games.

Back in a facsimile edition is Martin Amis’s closet passion project, first published in 1982: a compulsive gamer’s guide to arcades and beating your younger self’s high score 
 
In this offbeat book, introduced by Stephen Spielberg, acclaimed author Martin Amis explores how 1980s video games took a generation by storm. Delving into the electric atmosphere of the arcades where he misspent his youth, he asks: Why did Space Invaders invade our hearts and minds? How much time, loose change and sex appeal did they cost us? And most importantly, which secret cheats and tactics must we master to reach the next level? 
 
Part cautionary tale, part celebration of a lifelong addiction, this is an essential manual for many a self-confessed cyber geek, computer nerd and joystick junkie.

Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1994-2016

The Rub of Time

One of the finest writers of our time turns his razor sharp wit to the US elections, pornography celebrity culture and a brief history of the name Tim.

The Rub of Time is Amis at his considered best, witty, erudite and unafraid… He is sweetly sentimental when it comes to the British royal family (why?), funny about tennis, always brilliant about the body, scorching in his refusal of death, its sorrows and humiliations… He is a great believer in semantic rigour; every sentence snaps with an accuracy that is fresh and fierce… This collection is full of treasures.

First-class… Amis reveres Vladimir Nabokov, and wonderfully evokes the author’s “miraculously fertile instability”, and the “dazed hymns to the bliss of existence”… Amis’s wide reading is prompted by pure pleasure and in this regard he is proudly Kingsley’s son… Amis’s literary criticism is richly enjoyable, his intellectual gifts are formidable and he is worthy of the praise he shovels upon Nabokov in his prime… His non-fiction is bayonet sharp… The Rub of Time is impressive. The inner world of the old devil on display is one to be treasured.

The reportage is some of the best stuff here. For someone who often doesn’t much seem to care for journalists, Amis is a very good journalist indeed. If anyone has written a better, more penetrating, more open-minded interview with John Travolta, for example, I’d like to see it… When he puts his nose to a text, close up, there are few readers like him… And his is superbly good at capturing the nub of what’s so interesting in DeLillo, deftly sectioning the phases of JG Ballard’s career, tracing the weirdly wonky process of Philip Roth finding his voice or summing up a mood in a glancing phrase.

Erudite, eclectic and entertaining, Amis’s essays offer serious assessments of Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow alongside a tour of the porn industry, an exemplary prolife of John Travolta and a hilarious analysis of the hazards of being christened "Tim".

He is our sure-footed mountain guide, leading us gleefully from one delight to the next in these quotation-rich encomiums. “Panegyric is rightly regarded as the dullest of all literary forms,” he writes in Nabakov’s Natural Selection, a scintillating panegyric that absolutely achieves its stated aim… The literary essays will leave you educated, enlightened, entertained… I defy anyone not called Tim to get to the end of the Henman-inspired essay, The Tims, without a helpless guffaw… Martin Amis is a great writer and a great reader.

There is no one alive — with the possible exception of Adam Mars-Jones — who can hear an ailing sentence and diagnose its problems with such devastating and gleeful precision.

Mellifluous elegance is an odd desideratum – Beckett possibly wasn’t going for that – but as Amis exhibits, it’s not the worst thing to have around… It turns out that brisk generalisations, nurtured for decades, lend themselves to potent writing. Certitude is the key to Amis’s superhuman flair – and what makes this collection so compelling… Part of the appeal of reading Amis is to holiday in a world of clean, legible order… The Rub of Time is a riot of immaculately delivered punchlines and improbably sustained set-pieces (a longish footnote on Trump’s use of “bigly”), of bons mots and mots justes.

Some absolutely A-grade literary journalism… It only takes a glance at the Larkin stuff…to reveal the depths of Mart’s engagement, his habit of throwing out apercus in half a line that would detain most critics for a paragraph… and his eye for individual physicality.

America, the slatternly muse, inspires Amis’s best writing… It is Amis’s sensitivity to language which allows him to describe the different sounds so precisely… His style, bolstered by Latinate and literary diction, doesn’t allow the reader to become complacent, to turn her gaze from the subject, to let her mind wander… Perhaps it is best to view Amis as a miner: deep underground, in the narrow tunnels and cramped caves, among the labour and the coughing and the dirt, he finds gold.

Typically glorious, typically enraging… You’re also reminded of his astuteness as a reader, and his instinctive grasp of what an author’s up to… Very few writers can surprise and delight in the way Martin Amis can. There may be pratfalls to come, there may be breaches of decorum, but that ear for the thought-rhythms will have to get a whole lot tinnier before I stop reading him.

There are some terrific essays here, especially those on the literary subjects most dear to him (Bellow and Nabokov booking the volume) and those to whom he was personally close, such as his father and Christopher Hitchens. A review of Nabokov’s barely sketched last novel, The Original of Laura, titled Nabokov and the Problem from Hell, grapples with greater honesty than any other critic has managed with Nabokov’s “nympholepsy” or, as it might be, sympathy with paedophilia.

Joyously self-deprecating… As in tennis, Martin Amis boasts a range of lightly executed master strokes, and sustains an entertaining game… Amis is as big a personality on the literary court as the players he lionises. The critical distinctions he draws between Vladimir Nabokov, the patrician émigré spinning “divine levity” out of his family’s flight from the Holocaust, and Saul Bellow, the loving immigrant with a visionary intellectual range and sentience, most often hit the mark.

This collection of essays, written over 30 years, is a joy to dip into as he brings his critical eye and linguistic dexterity to bear on literature and politics, sport and pornography.

Think of Milton’s… Darkly glittering Satan – vivid, passionate, partisan and fatally persuasive – and you have Martin Amis... The Rub of Time is written in the teeth of mortality. Here is Amis, often at his most brilliant, quick, passionate, very funny and up to his eyes in the mess of being human… For all their cleverness, these essays are characterized by their emotional engagement. Amis gathers his personal canon around him, as you might pull a cloak tight against the cold and coming dark… It’s Life that Amis is interested in. His plea, addressed to Time, is: give us just a little more Life, damn you.

Euphonious, penetrating and very funny. Amis on Larkin. Amis on porn. Amis on Amis. You’d better get it.

Martin Amis’s non-fiction stretches the mind and the vocabulary of his readers. He is acutely perceptive, and illuminates and reveals an author or a book. The Rub of Time…, his recent collection of pieces written between 1986 and 2016, is brilliant on politics, poker, people and place. Unmissable.

They are also little masterpieces in themselves - almost every sentence in my copy is in underlined. Amis is a good novelist but he's a brilliant essayist.

[Amis] knows how to make his words stick in your head. A real treat

Of all the great novelists writing today, none shows the same gift as Martin Amis for writing non-fiction – his essays, literary criticism and journalism are justly acclaimed. 
 
The Rub of Time comprises superb critical pieces on Amis’s heroes Nabokov, Bellow and Larkin to brilliantly funny ruminations on sport, Las Vegas, John Travolta and the pornography industry. The collection includes his essay on Princess Diana and a tribute to his great friend Christopher Hitchens, but at the centre of the book, perhaps inevitably, are essays on politics, and in particular the American election campaigns of 2012 and 2016. One of the very few consolations of Donald Trump’s rise to power is that Martin Amis is there to write about him.

There is a murderer, there is a murderee, and there is a foil.

Everyone is always out there searching for someone and something, usually for a lover, usually for love. And this is a love story. 
 
But the murderee - Nicola Six - is searching for something and someone else: her murderer. She knows the time, she knows the place, she knows the motive, she knows the means. She just doesn't know the man. 
 
London Fields is a brilliant, funny and multi-layered novel. It is a book in which the narrator, Samson Young, enters the Black Cross, a thoroughly undesirable public house, and finds the main players of his drama assembled, just waiting to begin. It's a gift of a story from real life...all Samson has to do is write it as it happens.

September 11, 2001-2007

The Second Plane

One of Britain's finest writers confronts the 'defining moment' of the 21st century.

Possibly the most fully engaged writer of our age

Trenchant, deeply informed and informative...an important volume

A stylist with the trick of defamiliarising the familiar, he is also a keen student of the public realm...we should prize him - for his engagement as well as his gifts

Entertaining, witty, thoughtful and sometimes discomforting

Martin Amis first wrote about September 11 a week later in a piece for The Guardian beginning, 'It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment.' 
 
He has kept returning to September 11, in essays and reviews, and in two remarkable short stories, 'In the Palace of the End' and 'The Last Days of Muhammad Atta'. All are collected here, together with an expanded account of his travels with Tony Blair in 2007 - to Belfast, to Washington, and to Baghdad and Basra. 
 
'We are arriving at an axiom in long-term thinking about international terrorism,' he writes: 'the real danger lies, not in what it inflicts, but in what it provokes. Thus by far the gravest consequence of September 11, to date, is Iraq... Meanwhile, September 11 continues, it goes on, with all its mystery, its instability, and its terrible dynamism.'

And Other Visits to America

The Moronic Inferno

A collection of essays on America by the author of London Fields, Money and Lionel Asbo.

Martin Amis's America is funny and horrific

Perceptive, witty and felicitously written... A terrific book

He writes brilliantly on novels and novelists. He has a laser-keen eye and an enviable descriptive power, using words with great originality and precision

As a foreign journalist-cum-essayist on America, Mr Amis has no equal

At the age of ten, when Martin Amis spent a year in Princeton, New Jersey, he was excited and frightened by America. As an adult he has approached that confusing country from many arresting angles, and interviewed its literati, filmmakers, thinkers, opinion makers, leaders and crackpots with characteristic discernment and wit. 
 
Included in a gallery of Great American Novelists are Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Joseph Heller, William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Paul Theroux, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Amis also takes us to Dallas, where presidential candidate Ronald Reagan is attempting to liaise with born-again Christians. We glimpse the beau monde of Palm Beach, where each couple tries to out-Gatsby the other, and examine the case of Claus von Bulow. Steven Spielberg gets a visit, as does Brian de Palma, whom Amis asks why his films make no sense, and Hugh Hefner's sybaritic fortress and sanitised image are penetrated. 
 
There can be little that escapes the eye of Martin Amis when his curiosity leads him to a subject, and America has found in him a superlative chronicler.

Martin Amis

His memoir is dazzling, provocative and mordant

Funny, sad, moving and absolutely riveting

On virtually every page there is a phrase that is blissfully funny and ingenious...never less than compelling

Three times in the reading of this book, the courage, compassion and simplicity of Amis's writing brought me to tears. As a portrait of sustaining love between a father and a son, Experience stands alone among the testaments

Martin Amis

Praise for Experience

A scrupulous and candid writer

His memoir is dazzling, provocative and mordant

Funny, sad, moving and absolutely riveting

A scrupulous and candid writer

His memoir is dazzling, provocative and mordant

Funny, sad, moving and absolutely riveting

A scrupulous and candid writer

His memoir is dazzling, provocative and mordant

Funny, sad, moving and absolutely riveting

Books by Martin Amis

Articles featuring Martin Amis

Martin Amis, 1949-2023

Where to start reading Martin Amis

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