Description

Inside Story draws on the life of Martin Amis. It starts with the death of his closest friend, Christopher Hitchens. This novel based on his own life explores love and loss. It also looks at family ties and friendship. It is for readers drawn to the lives of writers. It asks how we can face pain and death.

Amis looks back at the people who shaped him. His father, Kingsley Amis, was a writer. Saul Bellow was his hero in the world of books. Philip Larkin and Iris Murdoch also appear. So does Elizabeth Jane Howard. Phoebe Phelps was his young love. She draws him in but is hard to grasp. She has no qualms about doing wrong. These close ties raise wider questions about life and death. Amis also weighs the horrors of the twentieth century. He looks at those of the early twenty-first century too. He asks how these horrors shaped his growth as a writer.

Amis was born in Oxford in 1949. In the 1980s, he rose to fame among British novelists. He wrote fourteen novels and two sets of stories. He also wrote eight nonfiction books. His first novel won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974. He wrote it while he worked at the Times Literary Supplement. He died in 2023.

Mihaela Ghita translated this edition from English. It is part of the Anansi Contemporan collection.