Martin Amis is perhaps the most gifted and innovative novelist of his generation. His prose refashions the English language into a lean and brilliant instrument, dazzling readers with its energy and wit. His novels and short stories chart a world that is uniquely his: as John Updike puts it, "Amis is trying to construct a large, reaching, ambitious set of books--trying to cover the world in fiction". His celebrity as a novelist is also unique--few writers have attracted such obsessive media attention. In this much-anticipated memoir, Amis writes with striking candour about his life and looks intimately at the process of writing itself.

As the son of a famous writer, the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, explores his relationship with his father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life, including the final crisis of his death. Amis also examines the case of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in 1973 (a month after the publication of his first novel), and was exhumed in 1994 from the back garden of Frederick West, Britain's most prolific serial killer. Inevitably, too, the memoir records the changing literary scene in Britain and the United States, with many anecdotes and pen-portraits.

The result is a remarkable work of autobiography--profound, witty and ruthlessly honest. As a writer's self-portrait, it is destined to become a classic.