Yellow Dog

Martin Amis’s brilliant and controversial new novel, already hailed in the British press as “Dickens with a snarl” and a “great comic extravagance.”

After Xan Meo is brutally attacked in the garden of a London pub and suffers a severe head trauma, his wife and daughters find they are living with a stranger—unpredictable, violent, vengeful, lost: “His condition felt like the twenty-first century: it was something you wanted to wake up from.”

While it may alarm his family, Xan’s new personality is a good match for the city and the age in which he lives. For this is the vicious London of tabloid journalist Clint Smoker, whose daily reports of illicit sex and outrageous scandal are every bit as fake (and artful) as the noose tattooed around his neck. This is a world where the King of England keeps a Chinese mistress in Paris and tries to suppress a video-taped, bathtub “intrusion” of his fifteen- year-old daughter from reaching the internet. A world of hit men, pornographers, tycoons, and displaced royalty. A world where brilliant people perform unspeakable acts and bodyguards provide no protection.

Yellow Dog is Martin Amis at his dazzling best—comic, fierce, gritty, and profound. Amis explores what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable: patriarchy and the entire edifice of masculinity; the violence arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream that we can protect our future and our progeny.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MARTIN AMIS’s most recent book was Koba the Dread. He lives in London

Martin Amis's brilliant and controversial new novel, already hailed in the British press as "Dickens with a snarl" and a "great comic extravagance."

After Xan Meo is brutally attacked in the garden of a London pub and suffers a severe head trauma, his wife and daughters find they are living with a stranger-unpredictable, violent, vengeful, lost: "His condition felt like the twenty-first century: it was something you wanted to wake up from."

While it may alarm his family, Xan's new personality is a good match for the city and the age in which he lives. For this is the vicious London of tabloid journalist Clint Smoker, whose daily reports of illicit sex and outrageous scandal are every bit as fake (and artful) as the noose tattooed around his neck. This is a world where the King of England keeps a Chinese mistress in Paris and tries to suppress a video-taped, bathtub "intrusion" of his fifteen- year-old daughter from reaching the internet. A world of hit men, pornographers, tycoons, and displaced royalty. A world where brilliant people perform unspeakable acts and bodyguards provide no protection.

Yellow Dog is Martin Amis at his dazzling best-comic, fierce, gritty, and profound. Amis explores what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable: patriarchy and the entire edifice of masculinity; the violence arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream that we can protect our future and our progeny.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MARTIN AMIS's most recent book was Koba the Dread. He lives in London

The New York Times

… the writing is still agile and exact, the hyperbole driven and punishing and the characters -- when he lets them be -- charismatically repulsive. — Walter Kirn

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.