Reviews
"Amis' phenomenal vim and versatility, anchoring roots in English literature, and gift for satire power this hilariously Dickensian, nerve-racking, crafty, bull's eye tale of a monster and a mensch…This deliciously shivery, sly, and taunting page-turner provokes a fresh assessment of the poverty of place, mind, and spirit and the wondrous blossoming of against-all-odds goodness." -Donna Seaman, Booklist, "Martin Amis has let himself go at last, [with] the broadest comedy he has ever published… Amis's delight in the incorrigible is genuinely Dickensian." -David Sexton, Evening Standard [U.K.] "Amis' phenomenal vim and versatility, anchoring roots in English literature, and gift for satire power this hilariously Dickensian, nerve-racking, crafty, bull's eye tale of a monster and a mensch…This deliciously shivery, sly, and taunting page-turner provokes a fresh assessment of the poverty of place, mind, and spirit and the wondrous blossoming of against-all-odds goodness." -Donna Seaman, Booklist, "A joy- and strangely life-affirming... It certainly has much of the dazzling prose that made his earlier works so stand-out. As ever he makes the dreadful funny, the grotesque poetic. But there's something else, a tenderness and humanity... Amis seems to have affection for all his characters [in what] could be seen as a meditation on social mobility... Though it satirises a society in decline it is also, in the end, a story about the triumph of education over ignorance, love over hate." -Carole Midgley, The Times [U.K.] " Lionel Asbo crackles with brilliant prose and scathing satire [and is] savagely funny... So who could predict that, from this deliciously nasty setup, an author the New York Times once called 'fiction's angriest writer' would craft a novel so... Dickensian, a novel with such... I hate to even say it...heart... What follows is hilarious and strangely compelling-a gleefully twisted Great Expectations ... Amis adopts a big, playful storytelling voice in this book. He riffs like a jazz master, in and out of vernacular, with brief gusts of description, all driven by a tight bass line of suspense." -Jess Walter, Publishers Weekly "A surprisingly tender story… For all its scabrous humour, this is at heart an old-fashioned tale in which goodness may still find a way to triumph." -The Daily Mail [U.K.] "The novel comes at you and comes at you and keeps on coming. It never flags… It is a great big confidence trick of a novel-an attack that turns into an embrace-a book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely. It is every inch the novel that we all deserve." Nicola Barker, The Guardian [U.K.] "A wicked satire [and] frequently wincingly funny. Amis's aim at the totems and mores of common fame is as unerring, and his phrase-making as pyrotechnically dazzling, as ever…Amis also writes with real and uncharacteristic tenderness." Mick Brown, The Telegraph [U.K.] "Martin Amis has let himself go at last, [with] the broadest comedy he has ever published… Amis's delight in the incorrigible is genuinely Dickensian." -David Sexton, Evening Standard [U.K.] "Amis' phenomenal vim and versatility, anchoring roots in English literature, and gift for satire power this hilariously Dickensian, nerve-racking, crafty, bull's eye tale of a monster and a mensch…This deliciously shivery, sly, and taunting page-turner provokes a fresh assessment of the poverty of place, mind, and spirit and the wondrous blossoming of against-all-odds goodness." -Donna Seaman, Booklist
