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Martin Amis, 1949-2023

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Where to start reading Martin Amis

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Features

Saying a sad farewell to large print books

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Martin Amis’ new autobiographical novel ‘Inside Story’ will be his ‘most intimate and epic work to date’

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Martin Amis reads The Pregnant Widow

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Podcasts

The Vintage Podcast: Ian McEwan and Martin Amis in conversation

Inside Story

'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 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*

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.

Yellow Dog

'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

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

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

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

Dead Babies

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

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

a Mystery Story

Other People

'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.

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

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

House of Meetings

‘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

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

Night Train

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

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

Martin Amis

50th Anniversary Edition

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

The Rachel Papers

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Remembering the iconic British author.

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Amis's impressive bibliography boasts 14 novels, a memoir, two collections of stories and eight collections of non-fiction. Here, we offer a guide to help you pick which Amis book to read first – or next.

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Books by Martin Amis