RESULTS

One of the most gifted and innovative novelists of his generation, Martin Amis writes with candour about his life, and intimately examines the process of writing itself. His memoir records the changing literary scene in the UK and the USA, with many anecdotes and pen-portraits.

There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night, with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. House of Meetings is about one such liaison. It is a triangular romance: two brothers fall in love with the same girl, a 19-year-old Jewess, in Moscow, which is poised for pogrom in the gap between the war and the death of Stalin. Both brothers are arrested, and their rivalry slowly complicates itself over a decade in the slave camp above the Arctic Circle. As one brother, finally, writes to the other, 'You know what happened to us? It wasn't just a compendium of very bad experiences. That was general and standard-issue. That was off the rack. What I'm referring to is the destiny that is made to measure. Something was designed inside us, blending with what was already there. For each of us, in different ways and settings, the worst of all possible outcomes.

London Fields is Martin Amis’s classic novel set in and around the streets and pubs of West London. Featuring a diabolical darts-playing wife-beating anti-hero, Keith Talent, the competitive nature of darts and the sub-culture around provide a central focus for the novel.

Detective Mike Hoolihan, an American policewoman, begins to investigate the suspicious death of a police colleague's daughter, a girl too blessed in looks, love and intelligence to commit suicide. As Mike probes further into Jennifer's life and death, she has to ask, 'If not who, then why?' A literary thriller which deals as much with the demons faced by Hoolihan as the crime she is investigating.

Martin Amis first wrote about September 11 a week later in a piece for The Guardian beginning, 'It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment'. He has kept returning to September 11, in essays and reviews, and in two remarkable short stories, 'In the Place of the End' and 'The Last Days of Muhammad Atta'. All are collected here, together with an expanded account of his travels with Tony Blair in 2007 - to Belfast, to Washington, and to Baghdad and Basra. 'We are arriving at an axiom in long-term thinking about international terrorism,' he writes: 'the real danger lies, not in what it inflicts, but in what it provokes. Thus by far the gravest consequence of September 11, to date, is Iraq ...Meanwhile, September 11 continues, it goes on, with all its mystery, its instability, and its terrible dynamism.'

A post-9/11 comedy, concerned with what is perhaps unchangeable: patriarchy and the entire edifice of masculinity; the enormous category-error of violence between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the illusion/delusion that we can protect our future and our progeny.