London Fields: Martin Amis

Amis’s powers of comic invention are formidable in this dark tale of disaster, sex, love, murder - and darts.

Set in a pre-millennial, pre-apocalyptic London, the novel follows femme fatale Nicola Six who has a premonition that she will be murdered on her thirty-fifth birthday. A willing victim, or ‘murderee’, Nicola sets out to arrange her own death by manipulating and fomenting a cast of unloveable yet compelling characters including Keith Talent, a yobbish low-life criminal and porn addict, Guy Clinch, handsome, wealthy and totally hapless, and the novel’s narrator Samson Young, an American Jew with a terminal illness and a serious case of writer’s block.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, London Fields reveals Amis at his most daring, revelling in post-modern gamesmanship and savage wit to serve up an incisive portrait of a world stumbling noisily towards the abyss.