Martin Amis Books in Order: Complete Bibliography & Best Starting Points
Martin Amis's complete bibliography in order — from Money and London Fields to The Information and Time's Arrow. Best starting points for new readers.
Martin Amis (1949–2023) was the most prominent British novelist of his generation — the son of Kingsley Amis, a friend of Christopher Hitchens and Saul Bellow, and a figure who embodied the anxieties and excesses of late twentieth-century literary culture. His fiction is characterised by its verbal density, its satirical energy, and its willingness to take formal risks that his contemporaries mostly avoided.
He died in Florida in 2023, having spent his final years in the United States.
Where to Start
Money: A Suicide Note (1984)
The essential starting point — John Self’s narration of his own destruction in 1980s London and New York is the most sustained and entertaining performance in Amis’s fiction. The novel’s energy, its language, its portrait of an era defined by appetite without restraint, makes it the most immediately pleasurable of Amis’s books. The best entry into his voice.
London Fields (1989)
The essential second novel — more structurally complex than Money, with Nicola Six’s manipulation of narrative as a formal principle. The novel’s portrait of London at the end of the 1980s — dark, polluted, facing some unspecified collective doom — is Amis’s most sustained vision of civilisation in decline.
Complete Bibliography
| Title | Year | Note |
|---|---|---|
| The Rachel Papers | 1973 | Debut; Somerset Maugham Award |
| Dead Babies | 1975 | Dark satire; country house |
| Success | 1978 | Two half-brothers; London |
| Other People | 1981 | Amnesia; psychological thriller |
| Money: A Suicide Note | 1984 | John Self; 1980s; best starting |
| London Fields | 1989 | Nicola Six; murder; narrative |
| Time’s Arrow | 1991 | Backwards; Holocaust; Man Booker shortlisted |
| The Information | 1995 | Rivalry; two writers |
| Night Train | 1997 | Crime; noir |
| Experience | 2000 | Memoir |
| The House of Meetings | 2006 | Gulag; Russia |
| The Pregnant Widow | 2010 | 1970; sexual revolution |
| Lionel Asbo | 2012 | Lottery winner; tabloid Britain |
| The Zone of Interest | 2014 | Holocaust; comedy |
| Inside Story | 2020 | Autofiction; late career |
Reading Order Recommendations
New to Amis: Money → London Fields → Time’s Arrow.
Satire focus: Money → London Fields → Lionel Asbo.
Complete: The Rachel Papers → Money → London Fields → Time’s Arrow → The Information.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Martin Amis book to start with?
Money: A Suicide Note (1984) is the best starting point — John Self, a dissolute British commercial director in New York and London, narrates his own degradation in Amis's most extravagant prose voice. The novel's energy is uncontainable; its satire of 1980s consumerism, masculinity, and the transatlantic media industry is still accurate. London Fields (1989) is the essential second novel — Nicola Six, who has foreseen her own murder, moves between two very different men in a London on the edge of some unspecified catastrophe. The more formally ambitious of the two.
What is Money about?
Money: A Suicide Note (1984) follows John Self — overweight, alcoholic, compulsively sexual, relentlessly spending — as he shuttles between London and New York trying to assemble a film. Self is an unreliable narrator of his own degradation; Amis appears in the novel as a character who warns Self about the trouble he is headed into. The novel is a portrait of 1980s excess — of a culture organised around appetite rather than restraint — narrated from inside that culture by someone who is both its product and its victim. One of the great comic novels in English.
What is London Fields about?
London Fields (1989) is Amis's most formally ambitious novel — narrated by Samson Young, an American writer in London who has taken over the flat of a novelist named Mark Asprey and is writing a true-crime narrative about a murder that has not yet happened. Nicola Six, who has a premonition of her own death, manoeuvres between two men: Keith Talent, a small-time criminal and darts fanatic, and Guy Clinch, a wealthy innocent. The novel is about manipulation, narrative, and the relationship between the writer and the story — specifically, the question of whether Samson is writing the story or whether Nicola is writing him.
What is Time's Arrow about?
Time's Arrow (1991) is Amis's most formally audacious novel — narrated backwards in time, from the death of an old man in America through his middle age, his wartime service, and finally to his work as a doctor at Auschwitz, where the reversal of time converts the murder of Jews into their creation. The novel's central trick — that everything looks different when time runs backwards — is also its moral argument: that the Holocaust required a deliberate reversal of human values, making destruction into creation and creation into destruction. One of the most formally inventive novels about the Holocaust.
