She knows she will be murdered. She believes she has chosen the man who will do it.
Samson Young arrives in 1980s London ill, broke, and determined to write one last novel. In a decaying city thick with corruption and appetite, he meets Nicola Six, a woman who is certain she will be killed on her thirty-fifth birthday.
Nicola is convinced the murderer will be one of two men already orbiting her. Keith Talent, volatile and reckless, and Guy Clinch, wealthy and naïve, are drawn into her confidence and her manipulation. She tests them both, as if narrowing the field.
Samson inserts himself into Nicola's circle, observing her calculation and encouraging the drama. Convinced he is documenting fate rather than shaping it, he begins to depend on the murder for the meaning of his book.
'A true story, a murder story, a love story and a thriller bursting with humour, sex and often dazzling language' Independent
Vorwort
'A true story, a murder story, a love story and a thriller bursting with humour, sex and often dazzling language' Independent
Autorentext
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.
Klappentext
Writer, Samson Young, is staring death in the face, and not only his own.
Void of ideas and on the verge of terminal decline, Samson's dash to a decaying, degenerate London has brought him through the doors of the Black Cross pub and into a murder story just waiting to be narrated.
At its centre is the mesmeric, doomed Nicola Six, destined to be murdered on her 35th birthday. Around her: the disreputable men who might yet turn out to be her killer. All Samson has to do is to write Nicola's story as it happens, and savour in this one last gift that life has granted him.
'A true story, a murder story, a love story and a thriller bursting with humour, sex and often dazzling language' Independent
Zusammenfassung
Writer, Samson Young, is staring death in the face, and not only his own. Void of ideas and on the verge of terminal decline, Samson s dash to a decaying, degenerate London has brought him through the doors of the Black Cross pub and into a murder story just waiting to be narrated. At its centre is the mesmeric, doomed Nicola Six, destined to be murdered on her 35th birthday. Around her: the disreputable men who might yet turn out to be her killer. All Samson has to do is to write Nicola s story as it happens, and savour in this one last gift that life has granted him. 'A true story, a murder story, a love story and a thriller bursting with humour, sex and often dazzling language' Independent