Stanley Duke thinks it is safe to sink into middle age, his son goes insane. As if that wasn't terrible enough, Stanley finds himself beset on all sides by women - neurotic, cantankerous, half-baked o
Kingsley Amis's memoirs are filled with anecdotes, experiences and portraits of famous friends, family, acquaintances. From his childhood days to Oxford and army life, his travels abroad and his years
Ending Up is a grotesque and memorable dance of death, full of bickering, bitching, backstabbing, drinking (of course), and idiocy of all sorts. It is a book about dying people and about a dying Engla
Malcolm, Peter and Charlie and their Soave-sodden wives have one main ambition left in life: to drink Wales dry. But their routine is both shaken and stirred when they are joined by professional Welsh
Includes a collection spans many genres, offering ingenious alternative histories, mystery and horror, satirical reflections and a devilishly funny attacks. In this book, the stories reveal the scope
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954.
Jenny Bunn and Patrick Standish have settled into London life with their troubled courtship long behind them. Patrick works in publishing and Jenny teaches sick children in a hospital. They have reach
Lieutenant James Churchill and his colleagues find themselves questioning their purpose. Are they for death or against it? These men of action travel between the barracks, the lunatic asylum and the h
“Sex, booze, and Russian intrigue . . . A cool cocktail mixed with parts of Updike and De Vries, with a peel of le Carré.”—The New York Times Book Review Richard Vaisey is a respected scholar specia
Kingsley Amis’s poetry tackles all the grimly humorous subjects he tackled in his novels—lust, lost love, booze, money and the lack of it, old age, death—and does so with immense formal poise. A maste
'I suppose it was conceited of me. But it was fun. And I felt like getting a bit of my own back on some of the people who'd conned and flattered me into wasting all those years.'
Dr Thomas Underhill, a notorious seventeenth-century practitioner of black arts and sexual deviancy. However, the landlord, Maurice Allington, is the sole witness to the renaissance of the malevolent
Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All repre
Competition is stiff for the position of sub-librarian in Aberdarcy Library. For John Lewis, the situation is complicated by the attentions of daunting and desirable village socialite, Elizabeth Gruff
Brimming with gluttony, booze and lust, Roger Micheldene is loose in America. Supposedly visiting Budweiser University to make deals for his publishing firm in England, Roger instead sets out to offen
Twenty year old Jenny Bunn is supernally beautiful and stubbornly chaste, which is why Patrick Standish, an arrogant schoolmaster, wants her so much. This novel about a northern girl who moves south,
Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden y
Douglas Yandell, a youngish music critic, is enlisted by Kitty Vandervane to keep an eye on her roving husband - the eminent conductor and would-be radical Sir Roy - as he embarks on yet another affai
Although Kingsley Amis's acid satire of postwar British academic life has lost some of its bite in the four decades since it was published, it's still a rewarding read. And there's no denying how big
Hubert Anvil is a 10 year old boy blessed with the voice of an angel. The Church hierarchy decrees that Hubert should be turned into a castrato - an alteration that could bring Hubert fame and fortune
Jake Richardson, an Oxford don nearing sixty with a lifetime's lechery behind him, is in pursuit of his lost libido and heads off to the consulting room of a miniature sex therapist. Not one to disobe
A mummy is stolen from a small town museum along with some Roman coins and a soaking wet man collapses in fourteen year old Peter Furneaux's living room bleeding from the head. What was a suspected st
