Martin Amis

Martin Amis's most formally audacious novel tells the life of a Nazi doctor — including his work at Auschwitz — entirely in reverse chronological order, narrated by a consciousness that inhabits the doctor's body but does not share his knowledge, experiencing time running backwards.

Set at a German concentration camp modelled on Auschwitz, Martin Amis's novel is narrated by three characters — a disgraced SS officer posted to the camp, the commandant's wife who begins to see the reality around her, and a Sonderkommando who bears witness — in a style that deploys Amis's characteristic dark comedy against the backdrop of industrial murder.

John Self, an English director of beer commercials, is flying between London and New York trying to make a film. He drinks, overeats, watches pornography, fights, spends money he does not have, and is being manipulated by forces he cannot see. Amis's monstrous comedy of the 1980s money culture — narrated in a prose of extraordinary comic energy by one of fiction's great unreliable slobs.

Richard Tull is a failed literary novelist; his best friend Gwyn Barry is a massively successful one. Their friendship — strained for years by the disparity in their careers — collapses when Richard's envy produces a campaign of sabotage as petty, unsuccessful, and undignified as Richard himself.

Martin Amis's debut novel, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, follows Charles Highway — nineteen years old, vain, bookish, and obsessively calculating — as he pursues and wins Rachel, then discovers that getting what you want is not the same as wanting what you've got.

Martin Amis's final novel blurs autobiography and fiction — following a character named Martin through decades of friendship with Christopher Hitchens, Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, and other literary giants, interwoven with craft lessons on how to write fiction, in what the author calls 'a novelised autobiography or an autobiographical novel.'

London, 1999. Nicola Six knows she is going to be murdered. She has always known it, the way she knows other things: as fact. She chooses her murderer from among the men in her orbit — Keith Talent, a professional darts player and petty criminal; Guy Clinch, a wealthy innocent. Sam Young, an American writer, narrates what he witnesses. Amis's most formally ambitious novel — noir, apocalypse, postmodernism.