Booklist

Martin Amis 1949 – 2023

Selected by the Bookshop


In 15 novels, from The Rachel Papers in 1973 to Inside Story in 2020 as well as in essays and journalism, Martin Amis, who died last week at the age of 73 has variously inspired, provoked, amused, appalled and thrilled several generations of readers. Here’s a selection of his key works.

From the publisher:
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. Amis also…

From the publisher:
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…

From the publisher:
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…

From the publisher:
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…

From the publisher:
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 scoreIn this offbeat book, introduced by Stephen…

From the publisher:
'Utterly compelling' GuardianLife...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…

From the publisher:
'The best thing Martin Amis has done in fiction for years' Literary Review …

From the publisher:
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…

From the publisher:
Six friends are determined to escape for a debauched weekend in the countryBlitzed on uppers, downers, blue movies and bellinis, the six twenty-something friends ensconced at Appleseed Rectory for the weekend are reeling in an hallucinatory…

From the publisher:
Koba the Dread is the successor to Amis's celebrated memoir, Experience. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by Western intellectuals. In between the personal…

From the publisher:
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…

From the publisher:
'Martin Amis at his best... Wonderful... Extravagantly funny’ GuardianWhen '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,…

From the publisher:
'A phenomenal writer' Sunday TimesAn 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…

From the publisher:
Fuelled by innumerable cigarettes, Martin Amis provides dazzling portraits of contemporaries and mentors alike: Larkin and Rushdie; Greene and Pritchett; Ballard and Burgess and Nicholson Baker; John Updike - warts and all. Vigorously…

From the publisher:
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…

From the publisher:
Like John Updike, Martin Amis is the pre-eminent novelist-critic of his generation. The War Against Cliche is a selection of his reviews and essays over the past quarter-century. It contains pieces on Cervantes, Milton, Donne, Coleridge,…

From the publisher:
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…

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