Lionel Asbo

Terrific… Both funny and serious, and (as always wth Amis) very very on-the-money’ * Richard Ford *This is classic Amis * Sunday Herald *The novel is something of a joy…he makes the dreadful funny, the grotesque poetic * The Times *It’s a Big Mac made from filet mignon… It is a book of lovehate. It is a powershake… A book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely. It is every inch the novel that we all deserve. * Observer *The broadest comedy he has ever published… Lionel is a fantastic brute… I laughed a lot. Amis’s delight in the incorrigible is genuinely Dickensian… This is a verbally inventive comedy…to be enjoyed in the same spirit as Little Britain… It’s a hoot * Evening Standard *I read the book in a sitting, chortling throughout…with its swaggering prose and undertow of quiet pathos, this book marks a return to something not far short of Amis’s best * Mail on Sunday *He remains one of the most interesting authors we have, not least for continually engaging with those areas in the life of a nation which journalists and politicians tip-toe around * Independent on Sunday *It had me roaring with laughter * Independent *Being an Amis novel it’s not without the odd good joke, and he is, of course, incapable of writing and inelegant line. It’s almost as if he alone can sense both the golden ratio of a sentence, and its perfect rhythm: it’s like he’s Michelangelo and Keith Moon * Sunday Telegraph *Full of hilarious set-pieces, wisecracks and wordplay. * Daily Express *

Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century - in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience - he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.

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