Martin Amis Books

Samson Young lands in London already half-finished, a man riddled with sickness and futility, watching the world’s decline through nicotine haze and literary desperation. All his life he has written other people’s stories—successful enough, but hollow—and now he’s trying to write one last book befor...

From London Fields

Nicola Six arrives as a vision—a clairvoyant, and not in the mystical sense, but in the tragically lucid one. She knows she will be murdered, and knowing it gives her a kind of terrible sovereignty. Imagine living inside a countdown where the clock ticks with erotic tension. She decides not to flee ...

From London Fields

John Self is an advertising director in London—a man who has mastered the art of selling wants, not needs. His existence is a perpetual hangover: a life stitched together by pubs, pornography, fast food joints, and the half-remembered promises of the next deal. Through his eyes, I wanted to make vis...

From Money: A Suicide Note

Selina Street—his girlfriend, his tormentor, his mirror—embodies for John both lust and humiliation. Their relationship is an endless performance of seduction and deception. Selina manipulates him with a cold mastery that reveals how money has corrupted intimacy. Every act between them, whether pass...

From Money: A Suicide Note

The story begins where life normally ends—with the death of Tod Friendly. His last moments, observed by an inner narrator who seems both inside and outside of him, are strange and disjointed. What to us is death, to the narrator is birth; what should be cessation becomes renewal. This backward movem...

From Time's Arrow

As time runs backward through Tod’s American years, the narrator reconstructs a life apparently full of benevolence. Tod appears to 'heal' patients by wounding them, 'comfort' lovers by withdrawing affection. To the backward gaze, his medical actions seem godlike—he removes sickness, but only becaus...

From Time's Arrow