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Summary

Once close friends, writers Gwyn Barry and Richard Tull now find themselves in fierce competition.

While Tull has spiralled into a mire of literary obscurity and belletristic odd jobs, Barry’s atrocious attempts at novels have brought him untold success. Prizes, prestige and wealth abound, and from far below Tull can only watch, stewing in torment.

Until, that is, resentment turns to revenge. Consumed by the question of how one writer can really hurt another, Tull’s quest for an answer will unleash increasingly violent urges on both writers’ lives.

‘A funny, vicious portrait of literary London’ Evening Standard

Reviews

A book of brilliant energies, a comedy of enraged passions. Amis's writing shares the grandeur of the big American writers
The Times

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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