The Pregnant Widow

The year is 1970, and it's a long, hot summer. In a castle on a mountainside in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on a sea of change, amid the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing—twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel—is struggling to twist feminism and women's ascendency toward his own ends.

The Barnes & Noble Review

The central question mark of this languid Italian summer is whether Keith will bed Scheherazade. As plots go, this is slighter than slight; it's practically The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Nevertheless, that old Amis magic -- prismatic linguistic invention, honesty bordering on cruelty, hearty laughs, and sex divorced from either lyricism or titillation -- ensures that the reader never notices, or complains. Amis is significantly warmer, more empathetic, toward his characters than he's been in the past, but that doesn't mean he describes them any less vividly or justly.

Martin Amis carried the nickname of enfante terrible of British literature far past his youthful debut at 24. His novels focus on excesses -- drugs, sex, money -- prompting Christopher Buckley to note in The New York Times in 1995 that his terrain is the junkyard of the human psyche and Mr. Amis is his generation s top literary dog.