Press

What the critics say

Martin Amis's Lionel Asbo made me laugh (as any novel driven by incestuous relations with your grandmother should) and then feel ashamed for that laughter (as any novel driven by incestuous relations with your grandmother should).
- Independent

It's a Big Mac made from filet mignon… It is a book of lovehate. It is a powershake. And the biggest joy is that Amis seems to find himself (and finds us, by extension) loving the thing he loathes... So let's give thanks that Martin Amis was bad enough and brave enough to write it
- Observer

This is still a Martin Amis novel, full of tense, fugitive moments…had me roaring with laughter.
- Independent

Being an Amis novel it’s not without the odd good joke, and he is, of course, incapable of writing and inelegant line. (It’s almost as if he alone can sense both the golden ratio of a sentence, and its perfect rhythm: it’s like he’s Michelangelo and Keith Moon).
- Sunday Telegraph

As soon as you begin this novel, it is clear that Amis does indeed love his monstrous invention, Lionel Asbo. Lionel is a fantastic brute… Amis’s delight in the incorrigible is genuinely Dickensian… This is a verbally inventive comedy…to be enjoyed in the same spirit as Little Britain… It’s a hoot.
- Evening Standard

The novel is something of 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.
- The Times

Last week I was lucky enough to be reading the latest Martin Amis novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England. I kept pulling it out of my bag on the Tube to read it and seeing Kindle owners quietly appraising the jacket (it has a lovely, provocative, red-and-white England flag cover).
- Financial Times

He remains one of the most interesting authors we have, not least for continually engaging with those areas in the life of a nation which journalists and politicians tip-toe around.
- Independent on Sunday

Manages to be both funny and serious, and (as always with Amis) to be very, very on-the-money about the culture – and not just British culture... Amis does the reader a brilliant, generous (and cathartic) favour.
- Guardian

The London Amis describes is the stuff of ten-past-the-hour news stories, and some of the characters are barely disguised tabloid celebrities, but the language is truly and deliciously Amis.
- Mail on Sunday

Savage black comedy… There are moments of chilling slow-motion terror, and Amis’s writing is a delight. Adjectives, adverbs and descriptions are kept on a choke chain, released, like Asbo’s Tabasco-fuleed pit bulls, only when they can really bite.
- Intelligent Life

Knockabout underclass comedy.
- Prospect

This is classic Amis.
- Sunday Herald

Lionel Asbo is entertaining and the prose has much of the customary fizz.
- Sunday Express

Amis is here in his contemporary curmudgeonly self, attempting a what's wrong-with-England analysis from the comfortable distance of his New York exile. Some of the satirical setpieces in this broad-stroke chronicle of a lottery-winning lout have a crude energy.
- Irish Independent

There were just so many sentences to delight you.
- Daily Telegraph

Gloriously funny and incisive about Britain’s feral underclass.
- Sunday Telegraph (Seven)

Smart, with plenty of lovable lowlifes, and biting satire.
- Sun

Amis obviously had the most tremendous fun dreaming up rubbish verse and spoofing Tabloid-see.
- Scotland on Sunday

The real thrill, as ever with Amis, is how well it’s written. He conjures a violent, anarchic world of grubby “white van skies”, celebrity culture and barking pitbulls that’s as sharply funny as it is recognisable.
- Shortlist

Full of hilarious set-pieces, wisecracks and wordplay. This is Amis’s funniest novel since 2003’s Yellow Dog, and perhaps since his masterpiece 1984’s Money.
- Daily Express

I read the book in a sitting, chortling throughout…with its swaggering prose and undertow of quiet pathos, this book marks a return to something not far short of Amis’s best.
- Mail on Sunday

There’s something powerful and authentic about 'its wrongness, its deafened bad dream feel'.
- Guardian

Martin Amis railed against the debasement of English culture in Lionel Asbo.
- Guardian