London Fields - (Vintage International) by Martin Amis (Paperback)

About the Book

In this wildly ambitious and funny novel, one of England's brilliant young writers relates two murders in the making. The first is the self-orchestrated extinction of Nicola Six. The second is the murder of the Earth itself, whose fate seems intricately bound up with Nicola's.

Book Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - A blackly comic late 20th-century murder mystery set against the looming end of the millennium, in which a woman tries to orchestrate her own extinction--from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation" (TIME).

"Lyrical and obscene, colloquial and rhapsodic." --The New York Times

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 Y2K approaches, Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing, has chosen her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her own 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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

MARTIN AMIS is the author of 15 novels--among them Zone of Interest, London Fields, Time's Arrow, The Information, and Night Train--along with the memoir Experience, the novelized self-portrait Inside Story, two collections of stories, and seven nonfiction books. He died in 2023.