Martin Amis: A Reading List

Martin Amis: A Reading List

This article relates to London Fields

Martin Amis (1949–2023) was an acclaimed English novelist and critic, known for his "bleak comedy," pyrotechnical prose, and his interest in vulgarity and profanity: creating "a high style to describe low things," as Dwight Garner put it in his obituary of Amis for the New York Times. His writing was witty, exuberant; he was, according to Garner, "the most dazzling stylist in postwar British fiction." The critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that he was "a writer equipped with a daunting arsenal of literary gifts: a dazzling, chameleonesque command of language, a willingness to tackle large issues and larger social canvases and an unforgiving, heat-seeking eye for the unwholesome ferment of contemporary life."

If you're wondering where to start with Amis, here are some of his best and most representative works:

Money: A Suicide Note (1984), London Fields (1989), and The Information (1995)

These three novels make up Amis's informal, so-called "London Trilogy." Money follows John Self, a director of TV commercials who comes to New York City to shoot his first movie. Self is self-loathing, self-destructive, "a semi-literate alcoholic" who gets progressively mired in financial and sexual crises and spirals downwards. London Fields is a postmodern, apocalyptic murder mystery, drenched in dread. The Information is about the consuming jealousy that one writer feels for another, a "tale of middle-aged angst and literary desperation," according to Kakutani. All three are language-forward, filled with and delighting in American and British vernacular, featuring monstrous characters who hypnotize you with their slangy voices.

Time's Arrow: Or, the Nature of the Offense (1991)

Short, gutting, but still funny, Time's Arrow is a great Amis to start with. The conceit is wholly original: It moves backwards in time. The novel starts with the protagonist, Tod Friendly, "waking up" from his deathbed and moving back through his life as the novel moves forward. He doesn't realize that it's backwards—he thinks that's just how time moves, although sometimes he picks up on how weird it is to, say, bid farewell to someone but remain facing them. In a heartbreaking plot progression, it turns out that Tod was a Nazi doctor who worked at Auschwitz, where, he is happy to find, he miraculously creates new people…only to realize his true actions too late.

Experience: A Memoir (2000)

Amis's novels of the 2000s were not as acclaimed as those that came before, but his memoir was well-regarded and remains so. (In 2019, the New York Times included it in their list of the 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years.) Experience explores Amis's relationship with his family, specifically his father Kingsley Amis, the famous author of the novel Lucky Jim (1954), who passed away in 1995. He also writes about his own life in the public eye as a celebrity author whose personal life and literary feuds were often tabloid fodder.

The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 (2001)

Amis was a fierce, intelligent, and illuminating literary critic, and a voracious reader of great literature. In this collection he writes about Austen, Nabokov (one of his two main influences, along with Saul Bellow), Updike, Dickens, and many other writers, as well as other interests, like chess, poker, soccer, and nuclear weapons. "To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart," he writes. "When I dispraise, I am usually quoting clichés. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy, and reverberation of voice."

Filed under Reading Lists

This article relates to London Fields. It first ran in the July 16, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.