Success

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Summary

'A terrifying, painfully funny Swiftian exercise in moral disgust' Observer

Smooth-talking, sensual and self-deluded, Gregory Riding leads an existence of formidable foppishness, his days and nights a series of effortless, titillating conquests and tireless sex - sister, employers, acquaintances are but co-stars among a cast of thousands to have passed through his busy bed. Meanwhile, Gregory's foster brother, Terry, has to make do with the leavings as he trawls through life in a miasma of grief, burdened by an unmentionable past and the unlikelihood of ever having a good time in bed.

But when Success swivels her capricious gaze roles are reversed with and the Riding brothers find their lives dramatically changed.

‘An instantly recognizable voice, penetrating, loquacious, slightly hysterical, upsetting, rising above the basso pseudo-profundo babble of his competitors like filed fingernails scraping down glass‘ Sunday Times

Reviews

Beautifully constructed to make a coherent, powerful and still fairly unusual statement about changing English society
Evening Standard

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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