Martin Amis at his best... Wonderful... Extravagantly funny
Guardian
As clever and convincing as ever
Sunday Telegraph
[There] are moments of magical vigilance and great emotional delicacy, intimations of a quite different kind of writer that Amis could be, or would be, perhaps, were it not for the demands of his devastating comic gift
Guardian
Mind tinglingly good... He seems to have guessed what you thought about the world, and then expressed it far better than you ever could... Here is a novel to silence the doubters...Amis has found a subject to match the tessellated polish of his style
Observer
'Lucid... Daring... A blissful antidote to the arrhythmic stylelessness of so much contemporary fiction
Time Out
His humour is a welcome change from the prevailing literary pietism
New Statesman
His prose sparkles
Scotsman
A consummate stylist...constantly and intensely aware of the language he is using, the medium of his art
Daily Mail
Raucously funny, relentlessly fast-paced, delightfully intricate... A marvelous novel, a powerful book, a work of pain and madness and love...a work of seriousness. A work of beauty
Baltimore Sun
Amis is a force unto himself... There is, quite simply, no one else like him
Washington Post Book World
'Martin Amis at his best... Wonderful... Extravagantly funny’ Guardian
When 'dream husband' Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head-injury, and personality-change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system - one among many to be found in these pages.
We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the 'yellow' journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Royce Traynor, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zizhen; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed 'intrusion' which rivets the world - because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King.
'As funny as Dead Babies, as blackly portentous as London Fields and as satirically on-the-nail as Money' Mail on Sunday