The Rachel Papers

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WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CLAIRE LOWDON

Charles Highway is every mother’s worst nightmare.

Precociously intelligent, mercilessly manipulative and highly sexed, Charles devotes the last of his teenage years to bedding girls and evading the half-arsed overtures of his distant parents. That is, until, he meets the aloof, wildly unattainable, Rachel.

As Charles’s twentieth birthday – and the Oxford entrance exams – loom, his plans for seducing Rachel will draw him into a private collection of obsessional notes and observations: the eponymous ‘Rachel Papers’.

WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD

‘Scurrilous, shameless and very funny’ The Times Literary Supplement

‘Amis has brought off the feat of satirizing his contemporaries while making them both funny and, in a bizarre way, moving’ Peter AckroydAmis has brought off the feat of satirizing his contemporaries while making them both funny and, in a bizarre way, moving—Peter Ackroyd

Scurrilous, shameless and very funny—Time Literary Supplement

Extravagantly sexual-highly enjoyable—Evening Standard

Amis’s arrogantly assured manner is a formidable weapon, spraying the target with disdainful wit, ingenious obscenity, astute literariness, loathing, lust, anxiety and an all-pervading hyper-self-consciousness—Observer

A magnificent novel, a masterpiece really, its prose energetic, angry, honest and so funny—Andrew Billen, The TimesMartin 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.GB

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