Kingsley Amis

Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the 20th century, this book remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954.

"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 England, clinging to its memories of greatness as it succumbs to terminal decay. Everyone wants a comfortable place to die, and Kingsley Amis's characters have found it in Happeny Tuppeny Cottage, out in the country, where assorted septuagenarians have come...

Kingsley Amis, along with being the funniest English writer of his generation was a great chronicler of the fads and absurdities of his age, and Girl, 20 is a delightfully incisive dissection of the flower-power phase of the 1960s. Amis’s antihero, Sir Roy Vandervane, a conductor and composer who bears more than a passing resemblance to Leonard Bernstein, is a pillar of the establishment whohas fallen hard for protest, bellbottoms, and...

Booker Prize Winner
A pub gathering of elderly married couples devolves into booze-inflected reminiscing—and complaining—in this “sharp and funny” English comedy about marriage, aging, and friendship (The Washington Post).
 
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...