Where to start with Martin Amis

British novelist, 1949–2023.

Best Martin Amis book to start with: Money (1984), on 3 of the 19 lists it could have made.

Money is the quickest way to find out whether you like Martin Amis. The narrator, John Self, is a loud and greedy advertising man moving between London and New York, and the whole book is his voice. If it grates by the end of the first chapter, you can stop and lose very little. If it makes you laugh, carry on.

London Fields is the next to try. It is bigger and more crowded, set in a London of cheap pubs and general unease, and it asks for the same appetite for his sentences. The Information, about two writers whose careers have gone in opposite directions, makes a good third.

For something shorter, Time’s Arrow tells a life backwards and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991. The Zone of Interest, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize in 2015, is set in a Nazi camp. It has far less of the comic bluster than the others, so come to it when you want him controlled and serious.