First published in 1989, LONDON FIELDS is set ten years into a dark future, against a backdrop of environmental and social decay and the looming threat of global cataclysm. As the dreaded millennium approaches, Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing, attempts to orchestrate her own extinction, choosing her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her murder. Whom to manipulate into killing her is the question; her choice wavers between violent lowlife Keith Talent, who is obsessed with winning a darts tournament, and a dimly romantic banker named Guy Clinch. When Samson Young--a writer suffering from a long bout of writer's block--stumbles upon these three, he believes he has found a story that will write itself. A highly unusual mystery with an unexpected twist at the end, LONDON FIELDS is also a corrosively funny narrative of pyrotechnic complexity and scalding moral vision.
JOHN SUTHERLAND is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at University College London and a regular columnist at The Guardian.
"Amis has trumped himself. . . . A complex and daring work that contains many passages of comic genius that can hardly be matched in English fiction since Dickens." --Newsday
"Amis' prose is hiw own: slangy, showy, knowing, with pinball rhythms. . . . [London Fields] is wickedly good." --Philadelphia Inquirer
"London Fields is Martin Amis' most ambitious, intelligent and nourishing novel to date. . . . Amis is hilariously eloquent." --Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Amis is a brilliant entertainer who knows how to wrap his anger at the terminal horrors of contemporary life in a movelike montage of varying styles and voices." --Newsweek
"A literary, funny, elaborate novel marinated in sex." --Wall Street Journal
"I Am one of many readers who thought that Money was the novel of the '80s, the book that captured the obscene greed of a decade. Now, with London Fields, Amis has published what may stand as the definitive end-of-the-millennium novel." --USA Today
"Amis is a clever, skillful writer, and London Fields displays his range of talents well." --San Francisco Chronicle
"His novel is a great act of generosity, a capacious and intelligent book that announces the author's importance in the arena of contemporary literature." --Vogue