Experience

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Summary

This is the great Martin Amis’s autobiography.

INTRODUCED BY ZADIE SMITH

It is a writer’s self-portrait – both a candid memoir and intimate insight into the process of writing itself. As the son of a famous writer, the comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with his father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley’s life, including the final one of his death.

Amis also reflects on the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in 1973 and was exhumed twenty years later from the basement of Frederick West, one of Britain’s most prolific serial murderers.

**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

'Martin Amis is a seriously good writer, and never on better form than now. Experience, the book of his life, may be the book of his life' Daily Telegraph

Reviews

A scrupulous and candid writer
Guardian

About the author

Martin Amis

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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