Time's Arrow

Time's Arrow

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 1991

Summary

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

Reviews

  • 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
    Guardian

About the author

Martin Amis

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.
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