Once close friends, writers Gwyn Barry and Richard Tull now find themselves in fierce competition.

While Tull has spiralled into a mire of literary obscurity and belletristic odd jobs, Barry’s atrocious attempts at novels have brought him untold success. Prizes, prestige and wealth abound, and from far below Tull can only watch, stewing in torment.

Until, that is, resentment turns to revenge. Consumed by the question of how one writer can really hurt another, Tull’s quest for an answer will unleash increasingly violent urges on both writers’ lives.

‘A funny, vicious portrait of literary London’ Evening Standard

A book of brilliant energies, a comedy of enraged passions. Amis's writing shares the grandeur of the big American writers * The Times *
Any other writer would kill to reach this high style. Amis can stroll the heights at his leisure - the writing is on fire
Martin Amis is an iconic figure. He cracks out memorable sentences like a ringmaster in the circus of the grotesque. He is the good-looking bad guy of late-twentieth-century Eng Lit - faster on the phrase than any of the other inky cowboys on the streets
Amis has made previous incursions into the grubby end of Ladbroke Grove and the infection of urban self-pity. But he's never been quite so funny about it * Independent *
Young men adore Martin Amis and older ones envy him. Many imitate him. Many want to be him. He can be cool and raw, smart and cool. He's sexy, but that's not all. Now we want the Information * Observer *
A funny, vicious portrait of literary London * Evening Standard *
Mr. Amis is his generation's top literary dog...dazzling... You're never out of reach of a sparkly phrase, stiletto metaphor or drop-dead insight into the human condition...Mr. Amis goes where other humorists fear to tread... Look out, Flaubert! Look out, Joyce! * New York Times Book Review *
This is Amis' best work to date...funny, angry, caustic and brilliant * The Montreal Gazette *
Talent of a very high order...darkly funny...vastly sophisticated... A particularly ingenious masterpiece of comic plotting * The Toronto Star *

Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century – in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience – he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.