An Italian poolside, Summer, 1970. Sex is very much on everyone's mind. The girls are acting like boys and the boys are going on acting like boys. Keith Nearing - a bookish twenty year old, in that much disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven - is struggling to twist feminism towards his own ends. Torn between three women, his scheming doesn't come off quite as he expects.
And now in the twenty first century, as Keith reflects on that summer holiday, the aftershocks of the sexual revolution finally catch up with him.
The Pregnant Widow is gloriously risqué and ferociously funny. It is Martin Amis at his fearless best.
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There is a sort of reverse bathos operating in Amis in which he slips from the empty epic to the comic sublime. At such moments, and there are plenty... no one better understands the cosmic joke that is humanity. Nor is anyone as funny telling it - Observer
Amis employs his trademark derisive wit - Marie Claire
Sumptuous... Moving and humane, The Pregnant Widow also captivates by the accumstomed wit and elegance of its style. Amis just writes so well and so freshly... Amis is consistently bold, visual and accurate... I love this novel and it warmed when I read it a second time. It is beautifully achieved, cunningly relaxed, and reveals considerable emotional depth... The Man Booker Prize would be no more than its due - Daily Telegraph
This is a fine and hilarious book... Mr Amis has always been a stimulating writer, and someone who gives a distinctive colouring to certain times in our lives. 'The Pregnant Widow' is Amis at his absolute and unique best - The Economist
Amis writes thrillingly well... [The Pregnant Widow] delivers fantastic enjoyment... It is funny, clever and knowing - Daily Mail
This is Amis' finest novel for a long time. It is close to a masterpiece... read it: it is hilarious, often wonderfully perceptive, uncompromisingly ambitious and written by a great master of the English language - Financial Times
Amis is a powerful writer - Independent on Sunday
There is something witty or striking on almost every page - Mail on Sunday
Martin Amis's new novel shows a regathering of his artistic energies - Guardian
The buzzing sense of fresh, limitless erotic licence is captured brilliantly ... he is beginning to write with Old Master assurance on the important subjects ... if Amis keeps writing like this about death, he can still prove everyone wrong' - The Times
Is this the return to the form we have all been waiting for? In short - yes, it is - Prospect
A compelling read - The Week
Wordy, but you're carried along in a slightly titillating way - The Observer
One of the funniest books I've read in a long time - Psychologies
He's a forceful comic stylist - London Review of Books
This novel dares to take risks... The Pregnant Widow, for all its faults, remains a marvel of unsparing satire of wasted lives, wasted opportunity - The Tablet
I love him. He provokes and is cruel but he does it in such a brilliant, hilarious way. I've read pretty much all his books... his writing is spare, so its impact is all the greater - Andrew Lincoln
The Pregnant Widow is replete with ambitious aphorisms, drunkenly swaying between brilliance and extraordinary silliness. - Third Way
I always relish the witty inventiveness of Amis's style - David Lodge, Guardian Summer Reading
I don't think you can ever be disappointed with an Amis novel - David Miliband, Daily Telegraph Summer Reads
Humane, rueful and wonderfully resourceful in its wit - Spectator, Christmas roundup
This book has that rare and wonderful quality of taking the reader into a charmed confidence he's not quite sure he deserves, but that he (in my case) wouldn't miss for the world - Guardian, Christmas roundup
Amazing... very well written. - The Word
The force of the well-chosen word promises great things of the whole. But does the whole deliver what's promised? Well in this instance, it does. - Guardian
Amis is back... andturns in his usual bravura performance - Herald
A breezy sex comedy - The Times
The more I read, the more I found myself enjoying it. It's funny in the way the early novels were, but to the mix has been added a kind of middle-aged melancholy...Also, don't let anyone tell you that Martin Amis can't do women characters - Gloria Beautyman is a brilliant creation. It's a novel about the sexual revolution, youth and age, and also offers a radical reinterpretation of Jane Austen. It's witty and poignant, and it has a killer last line. - Independent on Sunday
The author's inimitable style and distinctive flair for description and metaphor still stand up proud...This is a simultaneously serious and entertaining novel about a seemingly sunny revolution that still casts long shadows. - Independent
Martin Amis is the author of eleven previous novels, the memoir Experience, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction, most recently The Second Plane. He lives in London.
