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#891 of 3,809 books · #350 in Biography & Memoir

Won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography (2000).

In this memoir, Martin Amis writes with candor about his life and, in the process, gives us a clear view of the "geography of the writer's mind." The son of the comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with his father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life, including the final crisis of his death. Amis also reflects on the life and legacy of his cousin Lucy Partington, who disappeared without a trace in 1973 and was exhumed nearly twenty years later from the back garden of Frederick West, Britain's most notorious serial murderer. Inevitably, too, the memoir records the changing literary scene in Britain and the United States, including a wealth of anecdotes, along with memorable pen-portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, Robert Graves, and Elizabeth Jane Howard, among others.

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Publisher
Vintage Canada
ISBN-13
9781446401460
Topics
Father-son relationshipLiterary life and writersFamily tragedy

Other awarded books from Martin Amis

Martin Amis has no other awarded or shortlisted books yet.