The Pregnant Widow

The Pregnant Widow

Summary


‘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

Reviews

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

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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