London Fields - (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics) by Martin Amis (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This is a Borzoi book"--Title page verso.

Book Synopsis

Martin Amis's acclaimed novel--now in a twenty-fifth-anniversary hardcover edition--is a blackly comic murder mystery about a murder that has not yet happened.

First published in 1989, LONDON FIELDS is set ten years into a dark future, against a backdrop of environmental and social decay and the looming threat of global cataclysm. As the dreaded millennium approaches, Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing, attempts to orchestrate her own extinction, choosing her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her murder. Whom to manipulate into killing her is the question; her choice wavers between violent lowlife Keith Talent, who is obsessed with winning a darts tournament, and a dimly romantic banker named Guy Clinch. When Samson Young--a writer suffering from a long bout of writer's block--stumbles upon these three, he believes he has found a story that will write itself. A highly unusual mystery with an unexpected twist at the end, LONDON FIELDS is also a corrosively funny narrative of pyrotechnic complexity and scalding moral vision.

Review Quotes

"A comic murder mystery, an apocalyptic satire, a scatological meditation on love and death and nuclear winter...by turns lyrical and obscene, colloquial and rhapsodic." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Amis has trumped himself. . . . A complex and daring work that contains many passages of comic genius that can hardly be matched in English fiction since Dickens." --Newsday

"Amis' prose is hiw own: slangy, showy, knowing, with pinball rhythms. . . . [London Fields] is wickedly good." --Philadelphia Inquirer

"London Fields is Martin Amis' most ambitious, intelligent and nourishing novel to date. . . . Amis is hilariously eloquent." --Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Amis is a brilliant entertainer who knows how to wrap his anger at the terminal horrors of contemporary life in a movelike montage of varying styles and voices." --Newsweek

"A literary, funny, elaborate novel marinated in sex." --Wall Street Journal

"I Am one of many readers who thought that Money was the novel of the '80s, the book that captured the obscene greed of a decade. Now, with London Fields, Amis has published what may stand as the definitive end-of-the-millennium novel." --USA Today

"Amis is a clever, skillful writer, and London Fields displays his range of talents well." --San Francisco Chronicle

"His novel is a great act of generosity, a capacious and intelligent book that announces the author's importance in the arena of contemporary literature." --Vogue

About the Author

MARTIN AMIS is the author of fourteen novels, the memoir Experience, several collections of stories, and six nonfiction books. He lives in Brooklyn.

JOHN SUTHERLAND is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at University College London and a regular columnist at The Guardian.