'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

'As funny as Dead Babies, as blackly portentous as London Fields and as satirically on-the-nail as Money' Mail on Sunday

About the 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.

Reviews
Martin Amis at his best... Wonderful... Extravagantly funny * Guardian *
As clever and convincing as ever * Sunday Telegraph *
[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 * Guardian *
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 * Observer *
'Lucid... Daring... A blissful antidote to the arrhythmic stylelessness of so much contemporary fiction * Time Out *



Book Information
ISBN 9780099267591
Author Martin Amis
Format Paperback
Page Count 352
Imprint Vintage
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 268g
Dimensions(mm) 194mm * 130mm * 28mm