Showing results by author "AMI" in All Categories

The murderee is Nicola Six, a 'black hole' of sex and self-loathing who is intend on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts; or the rich, honourable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch. And as Nicola leads her suitors towards the precipice, London - and, indeed, the whole world - seems to shamble after them in a corrosively funny novel of complexity and morality.

What happens when we discover who we really are? And how do we come to terms with it? Can we even meet each other's eye, after we have seen who we really are? Fearless and original, The Zone of Interest is a violently dark love story set against a backdrop of unadulterated evil, and a vivid journey into the depths and contradictions of the human soul.

There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. House of Meetings is about one such liaison. It is a triangular romance: two brothers fall in love with the same girl in Moscow, which is poised for pogrom in the gap between the war and the death of Stalin. Both brothers are arrested, and their rivalry slowly complicates itself over a decade in the slave camp above the Arctic Circle.

Newly single and still reeling from the revelation of her ex’s infidelity, only just about ready to stop wearing her engagement ring, it’s safe to say romance is the last thing on Rosie’s mind at her employer’s lavish summer party. Then Ethan Harber bursts on the scene. Rich, handsome, uncompromising, and dangerous, the magnetic connection between them is instantaneous, and Rosie finds herself drawn into a confusing and intense world of uncertainty and passion.

His most intimate and epic work to date, Inside Story is the portrait of Martin Amis' extraordinary life, as a man and a writer. This novel had its birth in a death - that of the author's closest friend, Christopher Hitchens. We also encounter the vibrant characters who have helped define Martin Amis, from his father Kingsley, to his hero Saul Bellow, from Philip Larkin to Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard, and to the person who captivated his 20s, the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps.

Competition is stiff for the position of sub-librarian in Aberdarcy Library. For John Lewis, the situation is complicated by the attentions of daunting and desirable village socialite Elizabeth Gruffyd-Williams, who is married to a member of the local Council. Pursuing an affair with her whilst keeping his job prospects alive is John's predicament, as he finds himself running down Welsh country lanes at midnight in a wig and dress, resisting the advances of local drunks and suffering the long speeches of a 'nut-faced' clergyman.

John Self is addicted to life. Porn freak and jetsetter, a aficionado of wealth and women, Self is the shameless heir to a fast-food culture where money beats out an insistent invitation to futile self-gratification. Out in New York, mingling with the mighty, making a fortune but spending more, Self is embroiled in the corruption, the brutality and the obscenity of the money conspiracy.

Like all good coaching inns, The Green Man is said to boast a resident ghost: Dr Thomas Underhill, a notorious 17th-century practitioner of black arts and sexual deviancy. However, the landlord, Maurice Allington, is the sole witness to the renaissance of the malevolent Underhill. Led by an anxious desire to vindicate his sanity, Allington strives to uncover the key to Underhill's satanic powers. All while the skeletons in Allington's own cupboard rattle to get out.

How can one writer hurt another where it really counts? The answer: attack his reputation. This is the problem facing novelist Richard Tull, contemplating the success of his friend and rival Gwyn Barry. Revenger's tragedy, comedy of errors, contemporary satire - The Information skewers high life and low in Martin Amis's brilliant return to the territory of Money and London Fields.

Elegant, provocative and hugely entertaining, Kingsley Amis's memoirs are filled with anecdotes, experiences and portraits of famous friends, family, acquaintances (and a few eminent foes). From his childhood days to Oxford and army life, his travels abroad and his years as a successful novelist, Memoirs offers extraordinary insights into a unique literary life.

Brimming with gluttony, booze and lust, Roger Micheldene is loose in America. Supposedly visiting Budweiser University to make deals for his publishing firm in England, Roger instead sets out to offend all he meets and to seduce every woman he encounters. But his American hosts seem made of sterner stuff. Who will be Roger's undoing? Irving Macher, the young author of an annoyingly brilliant first novel? Father Colgate, the priest who suggests that Roger's soul is in torment? Or will it be his married ex-lover Helene? One thing is certain - Roger is heading for a terrible fall.

For the first time in audio, savour this volume bringing together the best of his three out-of-print works on the art of, and most importantly, practice of drinking. Including Kingsley Amis in Drink, Everyday Drinking and How's Your Glass?, this collection celebrates Amis' comic prose and collected thoughts on the art of drinking, alongside well-tested recipes.

It was summer 1970 – a long, hot summer. In a castle in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, and the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing – twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel – is struggling to twist feminism and the rise of women towards his own ends.

The year is 1880. Two hundred years after the trials in Salem, witches Adelaide Thom and Eleanor St Clair finally feel safe and have opened a tea shop in Manhattan, specialising in cures, palmistry and potions. When an enchanting young woman called Beatrice joins the witches as an apprentice, she soon proves indispensable, but her new life is marred by strange occurrences. She sees things no one else can see. She hears voices no one else can hear. Objects appear out of thin air, as if gifts from the dead.

The life of secret agent James Bond has begun to fall into a pattern that threatens complacency…until the sunny afternoon when M is kidnapped. The action ricochets across the globe to a volcanic Greek island, where Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the People's Liberation Army of China collaborates with an ex-Nazi atrocity expert in a world-menacing conspiracy. Stripped of all professional aids, Bond faces, unarmed, the monstrous devices of Colonel Sun....

At Tuppenny-Hapenny Cottage in the English countryside, five elderly people live together in rancorous disharmony. Adela Bastable bosses the house, as her brother Bernard passes his days thinking up malicious schemes against the baby-talking Marigold and secret drinker Shorty, while kindly George lies bedridden upstairs. The mismatched quintet keep their spirits alive by bickering and waiting for grandchildren to visit at Christmas. But the festive season does not herald goodwill to all at Tuppenny-Hapenny Cottage. Disaster and chaos, it seems, are just around the corner.

Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England' and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's awful son Bertrand.

Malcolm, Peter and Charlie and their Soave-sodden wives have one main ambition left in life: to drink Wales dry. But their routine is both shaken and stirred when they are joined by professional Welshman Alun Weaver (CBE) and his wife, Rhiannon.

The short stories of Kingsley Amis - the great master of post-war comic prose - are dark, playful, moving, surprising and extremely funny. This definitive collection gathers all Amis' short fiction in a single volume for the first time and encompasses five decades of storytelling.

A mummy is stolen from a small-town museum along with some Roman coins and a soaking wet man collapses in 14-year-old Peter Furneaux's living room bleeding from the head. What was a suspected student prank is followed by murder. At first it is impossible to see the connection, but the eccentric Colonel Manton does.