A short novel in which the investigation into the death of a police colleague's daughter leaves policewoman, Mike Hoolihan, with some peculiar questions, many of which she cannot answer. 'Exhilarating... hugely enjoyable to read... }Night Train

Una ragazza, in seguito a un'aggressione nel corso della quale è stata stuprata e quasi uccisa, perde la memoria. Non ricordandosi più la propria identità, assume il nome di Mary Lamb e cerca, con fatica e candore, di mettere insieme pezzi di passato e consapevolezze perdute. Finché, a poco a poco, si fa strada in modo sempre più convincente l'angoscioso sospetto che la sua identità sia legata a quella di una certa Amy Mide, una ragazza che per amore ha commesso ogni genere di nefandezze.

Il nuovo romanzo di Martin Amis ha per protagonista una donna detective: americana, sui quarant'anni, grassa, piuttosto brutta. A lei viene affidata l'indagine sul suicidio di una donna che è stata anche sua amica: un'astrofisica molto intelligente, bellissima, fidanzata con un uomo altrettanto perfetto. Difficile davvero dire che cosa abbia potuto incrinare questa apparente felicità. La detective si mette al lavoro, seguendo piste che portano tutte alla medesima conclusione: da un anno la donna sapeva di essere afflitta da una malattia incurabile, aveva fatto di tutto per tenerla nascosta, ma alla fine la follia aveva vinto.

Fame, envy, lust, violence, intrigues literary and criminal--they're all here in The Information. How does one writer hurt another writer? This is the question novelist Richard Tull mills over, for his friend Gwyn Barry has become a darling of book buyers, award committees, and TV interviewers, even as Tull himself sinks deeper into the sub-basement of literary failure. The only way out of this predicament, Tull believes, is the plot the demise of Barry.

'With The Information, Amis delivers a portrait of middle-age realignment with more verbal felicity and unbridled reach than [anyone] since Tom Wolfe forged Bonfire of the Vanities.'--Houston Chronicle

Il romanzo mette in scena uno dei sentimenti più diffusi: l'invidia. Due amici, entrambi scrittori, nati e cresciuti insieme, sono in realtà divisi da una rivalità feroce. La satira di Amis colpisce senza pietà gli aspetti più grotteschi della cultura-spettacolo.

To this tantalizing nonfiction collection Martin Amis brings the same megawatt wit, wickedly acute perception, and ebullient wordplay that characterize his novels. He encompasses the full range of contemporary politics and culture (high and low) while also traveling to China for soccer with Elton John and to London's darts-crazy pubs in search of the perfect throw. Throughout, he offers razor-sharp takes on such subjects as:

American politics: "If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, then the Reagan era can be seen as an eight-year blackout. Numb, pale, unhealthily dreamless: eight years of Do Not Disturb."

Chess: "Nowhere in sport, perhaps in human activity, is the gap between the tryer and the expert so astronomical.... My chances of a chess brilliancy are the 'chances' of a lab chimp and a type writer producing King Lear."

She wakes in an emergency room in a London hospital, to a voice that tells her: "You're on your own now. Take care. Be good." She has no knowledge of her name, her past, or even her species. It takes her a while to realize that she is human -- and that the beings who threaten, befriend, and violate her are other people. Some of whom seem to know all about her.

In this eerie, blackly funny, and sometimes disorienting novel, Martin Amis gives us a mystery that is as ambitious as it is intriguing, an investigation of a young woman's violent extinction that also traces her construction of a new and oddly innocent self.

In Time's Arrow the doctor Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home. And all the while Tod's life races backward toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense.

"The narrative moves with irresistible momentum.... [Amis is] a daring, exacting writer willing to defy the odds in pursuit of his art."--Newsday

In his uproarious first novel Martin Amis, author of the bestselling London Fields, gave us one of the most noxiously believable -- and curiously touching -- adolescents ever to sniffle and lust his way through the pages of contemporary fiction. On the brink of twenty, Charles High-way preps desultorily for Oxford, cheerfully loathes his father, and meticulously plots the seduction of a girl named Rachel -- a girl who sorely tests the mettle of his cynicism when he finds himself falling in love with her.

In Success Amis pens a mismatched pair of foster brothers--one "a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude," the other a "bundle of contempt, vanity and stock-response"--in a single London flat. He binds them with ties of class hatred, sexual rivalry, and disappointed love, and throws in a disloyal girlfriend and a spectacularly unstable sister to create a modern-day Jacobean revenge comedy that soars with malicious poetry.

London Fields is Amis's murder story for the end of the millennium. The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts. Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch?

"A comic murder mystery, an apocalyptic satire, a scatological meditation on love and death and nuclear winter...by turns lyrical and obscene, colloquial and rhapsodic."--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

If the Marquis de Sade were to crash one of P. G. Wodehouse's house parties, the chaos might resemble the nightmarishly funny goings-on in this novel by the author of London Fields. The residents of Appleseed Rectory have primed themselves both for a visit from a triad of Americans and a weekend of copious drug taking and sexual gymnastics. There's even a heifer to be slugged and a pair of doddering tenants to be ingeniously harassed. But none of these variously bright and dull young things has counted on the intrusion of 'dead babies' -- dreary spasms of reality. Or on the uninvited presence of a mysterious prankster named Johnny, whose sinister idea of fun makes theirs look like a game of backgammon.

A collection of stories about a frightening world inhabited by people dehumanized by the daily threat of nuclear war and postwar survivors deformed by its results.