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Biographical note
Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century – in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience – he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.Sparkling might not be the first adjective that springs to mind to describe a novel packed with the concentrated disgust which Dead Babies contains. Nevertheless, Martin Amis's version of the bleak and wrecky future that awaits a sex-and-drug-addicted society is so fizzing with style, so busy with verbal inventiveness, that the adjective is impelled upon one
- Julian Barnes,
Viciously funny, at once a hilarious joke and a technical triumph
Financial Times
Very funny, extremely clever
Guardian
A fine piece of comic-writing
Times literary supplement
Six friends are determined to escape for a debauched weekend in the country
Blitzed on uppers, downers, blue movies and bellinis, the six twenty-something friends ensconced at Appleseed Rectory for the weekend are reeling in an hallucinatory haze of sex and seduction.
But mysterious ‘Johnny’ begins to unsettle the other guests. And as Friday melts into Saturday and Saturday spirals into Sunday and sobriety sets in, the romp descends into something altogether more sinister.
'It's transfixing - At first it's funny. It teases, exaggerates, deliberates. Then it becomes ferocious, stricken, moving' The Times
‘Very funny, extremely clever’ Guardian
Six friends are determined to escape for a debauched weekend in the country
Blitzed on uppers, downers, blue movies and bellinis, the six twenty-something friends ensconced at Appleseed Rectory for the weekend are reeling in an hallucinatory haze of sex and seduction.