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The year is 1970, and the youth of Europe are in the chaotic, ecstatic throes of the sexual revolution. Though blindly dedicated to the cause, its nubile foot soldiers have yet to realize this disturbing truth: that between the death of one social order and the birth of another, there exists a state of terrifying purgatory—or, as Alexander Herzen put it, a pregnant widow.
Keith Nearing is stuck in an exquisite limbo. Twenty years old and on vacation from college, Keith and an assortment of his peers are spending the long hot summer in a well-appointed castle in Italy. He’s accompanied by his girlfriend, Lily, who is shrewd, witty, attractive and utterly eclipsed by her guileless friend Scheherazade, whose family owns the place. Scheherazade is slender, blond, impossibly long-legged and ravishingly beautiful, and her primary summertime goal is to achieve a completely uninterrupted tan. Keith, of course, is hopelessly and desperately in love with her, though he’s marginally successful at convincing Lily that her friend just isn't his type. These three are soon joined in their idyll by a number of unique and memorable characters: Adriano, a young Italian count as full of virile confidence as he is lacking in stature; the pretty, doomed Kenrik; the spectacularly dissolute Rita; the adolescent Conchita and her enormously fat caretaker, Dodo; Scheherazade’s boyfriend, Timmy, an obliviously earnest evangelist; and Gloria Beautyman, whose militantly ladylike veneer conceals a nature far stranger and more deceitful than anyone could ever guess.
The tragicomedy of manners that ensues will have an indelible effect on all its participants, and we witness, too, how it shapes Keith's subsequent love life for decades to come. Bitingly funny, full of wit and pathos, The Pregnant Widow is a trenchant portrait of young lives being carried away on a sea of change.
"As if these weren’t clues enough to Keith’s real identity – Amis also turned 21 in 1970 and, after Oxford, got his first job at the TLS – he is obsessed with his height. Like Amis, Keith occupies that 'much-disputed territory between five-foot-six and five-foot-seven'." - The Telegraph (UK)
"A hostile reading of The Pregnant Widow might be that it blames Keith's moral quasi-degradation and failure as a poet on too close or too early an association with naughty ladies. A more sympathetic one would be that the novel portrays the 70s as the ground zero of a narcissistic baby-boomer culture that coarsened both sexes, a culture in which Amis's writerly enterprise is implicated too." - The Guardian (UK)
"At moments like these, Amis is a powerful writer, but the vast majority of The Pregnant Widow is a self-obsessed irrelevance, leaving the reader with a monumental feeling of 'so what?'" - The Independent (UK)
"A potentially stunning novel ends up containing the familiar ratio of what is good and bad in Amis’s writing, the usual mix of Amis gems and Amis junk." - The Times (UK)
"Starred Review. After the disappointment of Yellow Dog and the relative slimness of The House of Meetings, this smart, meaty novel is a revelation." - Publishers Weekly
"Earthy, passionate, literate, and poignant; pick this for your highbrow beach read." - Library Journal
"Amid this 'erotically decisive summer,' the reader's frustration becomes almost as great as Keith's, as extended discourses on literature, life and religion lead to little resolution, literary or otherwise." - Kirkus Reviews
"Starred Review. Amid droll banter and hilariously raunchy episodes, immensely gifted and piquantly mercurial Amis ponders, in passages of surpassing eloquence, beauty, time, self, deception, “the winepress of death,” and the abiding light of literature, deepening the valence of this charmingly provocative and philosophical comedy of desire." - Booklist
This information about The Pregnant Widow was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Isabel Fonseca
Martin Amis was the author of fourteen novels, two collections of stories and eight works of non-fiction. His novel Time's Arrow was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for which his subsequent novel Yellow Dog was also longlisted, and his memoir Experience won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest writers since 1945. Amis died in May 2023.
Name Pronunciation
Martin Amis: AIM-is
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