Martin Amis Books in Order

On the eve of Oxford, bright, vain teenager Charles Highway plots to seduce Rachel and control every feeling on paper. Instead he runs into real love, embarrassment, and the chaos of growing up.

A group of young people gather at a country house for a weekend of drugs, sex, and cruelty. The party starts as black comedy, then curdles into something nastier and more dangerous.

Foster brothers Gregory Riding and Terry Service narrate a year in which their fortunes reverse. It is a dark, funny study of envy, class, sex, and how fast social confidence can collapse.

Waking with no memory, Mary Lamb has to relearn London, language, and her own past from scratch. The novel works as an eerie mystery and a darkly comic study of innocence under pressure.

A lively snapshot of arcade culture at the start of the 1980s, part scene report and part strategy guide. Amis writes about machines like Pac-Man and Defender with surprise, humor, and real competitive zeal.

John Self, an ad man and would-be filmmaker, bounces between London and New York chasing a movie deal and feeding every appetite he has. It is a savage, very funny satire of greed, excess, and self-deception.

A collection of pieces on America, from writers and filmmakers to politics, religion, and pop culture. It shows Amis as a sharp traveler, interviewer, and essayist, fascinated and baffled in equal measure.

Five linked stories and an opening essay take on nuclear fear from odd, satirical angles. Amis treats the bomb as a fact of imagination as much as politics, making the collection unsettling and strangely playful.

In a grimy near-future London, dying writer Samson Young watches Nicola Six move toward a murder she seems to foresee. Keith Talent, Guy Clinch, and a city running on rot turn it into a feverish comic apocalypse.

Told backward, this novel retraces the life of a doctor from death to birth and slowly reveals his role in the Holocaust. The reverse timeline makes moral horror feel strange, intimate, and impossible to dodge.

Essays, profiles, interviews, and reviews gathered from Amis's journalism. The title piece visits Vera Nabokov, and the whole book shows his range as a literary critic and curious, sometimes mischievous reporter.

A slim volume containing *Denton's Death* and *Let Me Count the Times*. Both pieces are intimate, sharp, and uneasy, showing Amis working at shorter length with obsession, sex, and emotional misfire.

A short Penguin 60s volume that reprints two nuclear-age stories from *Einstein's Monsters*. Amis mixes scientific unease, dark comedy, and looming catastrophe in a compact, unsettling pair.

Failed novelist Richard Tull becomes consumed by envy of his old friend Gwyn Barry, whose books sell while his do not. Amis turns literary jealousy into a vicious, funny portrait of rivalry and humiliation.

Detective Mike Hoolihan investigates the apparent suicide of Jennifer Rockwell, a brilliant scientist who seemed to have everything. What begins like noir becomes a bleak inquiry into despair and the limits of explanation.

Nine stories ranging from satire to melancholy, including the famous role-reversal tale *Career Move*. The collection shows how comfortable Amis was with outrageous premises, bleak jokes, and sudden turns into sadness.

Amis's memoir moves through childhood, family, friendship, grief, and the odd business of becoming a public writer. Kingsley Amis stands at its center, but the book also opens into loss, literary life, and memory.

This large collection of criticism gathers Amis on novelists, style, bad writing, and the pleasures of fresh language. It is a strong place to meet his literary tastes, his arguments, and his impatience with lazy prose.

Amis wrestles with Stalin, Soviet terror, and the moral evasions that let mass murder be minimized. Part history, part polemic, and part personal reckoning, it is one of his angriest nonfiction books.

After actor and writer Xan Meo is brutally attacked, his mind, marriage, and moral bearings begin to slide. Amis mixes his crisis with royal scandal, tabloid filth, and gangster violence in a jagged London comedy.

With photographs by Stefano De Luigi and text by Amis, this illustrated book goes behind the scenes of the global porn industry. The result is less lurid than curious, mixing blunt observation, unease, and dry humor.

A sampler of Amis at work across memoir, fiction, stories, and essays. It is a useful doorway if you want one book that shows his voice in several forms.

An unnamed man looks back on life in a Soviet gulag, where he and his half-brother loved the same woman. The novel is spare, cold, and fixed on violence, memory, and the scars of Stalinism.

Essays, reportage, and stories written in the years after September 11. Amis grapples with terrorism, war, ideology, and public argument in a book that is tense, confrontational, and very much of its moment.

In the long hot summer of 1970, Keith Nearing and a small group of young people drift through sex, jealousy, and confusion in an Italian castle. Amis uses their holiday to examine the sexual revolution while it is still unsettled.

Teenager Desmond Pepperdine tries to build a decent life while living with his brutal, vulgar uncle Lionel in Diston. When Lionel wins the lottery, the book turns into a nasty, funny satire of celebrity and social decay.

Set at Auschwitz, the novel follows a camp commandant, a Nazi officer infatuated with the commandant's wife, and a Jewish Sonderkommando. Amis forces love, bureaucracy, and moral collapse into the same terrible space.

This late essay collection moves through literature, politics, sport, America, and friendship. Nabokov, Bellow, Hitchens, tennis, poker, and Trump all appear, giving a broad view of Amis the critic and reporter.

Part novel, part memoir, this late work circles friendship, desire, writing, and death. Amis looks hard at Christopher Hitchens, Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, and himself, while stopping to talk directly about how stories get made.

An illustrated book of photographs from racecourses in southern England. It watches bettors, bookies, and spectators in moments of hope, boredom, nerves, and brief triumph, turning a day at the races into a social portrait.

An illustrated survey of chess in culture, history, and photography, with an essay by Amis. It is less a manual than a stylish celebration of the game's strange hold on artists, celebrities, and serious players.