Excerpt from London Fields by Martin Amis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Three days in and I am ready - I am ready to write. Hear my knuckles crack. Real life is coming along so fast that I can no longer delay. It's unbelievable. Two decades of fastidious torment, two decades of non-starting, and suddenly I'm ready. Well, this was always destined to be the year of behaving strangely. Let me say with due modesty and caution that I have the makings of a really snappy little thriller. Original, too, in its way. Not a whodunit. More a whydoit. I feel sickly and enraptured. I feel bright green. I think I am less a novelist than a queasy cleric, taking down the minutes of real life. Technically speaking, I am also, I suppose, an accessory before the fact, but to hell with all that for now. I woke up today and thought: If London is a spider's web, then where do I fit in? Maybe I'm the fly. I'm the fly.

Hurry. I always assumed I'd start with the murderee, with her, with Nicola Six. But no, that wouldn't feel quite right. Let's start with the bad guy. Yeah. Keith. Let's start with the murderer.

Excerpted from London Fields by Martin Amis. Copyright © 1991 by Martin Amis. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.