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.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Show moreMartin 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.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Show moreMARTIN 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.
"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
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