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Girl, 20
- Author
- Kingsley Amis
- Narrator
- Oliver Chris
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date
- 30 May 2023
- Run Time
- 7 hours 43 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
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 who has fallen hard for protest, bellbottoms, and the electric guitar. And since vain Sir Vandervane is a great success, he is also free to pursue his greatest failing: a taste for younger and younger women.
Highborn hippie Sylvia—not, in fact, twenty—is his latest infatuation and a threat to his whole family, from his drama-queen wife, Kitty, to his long-suffering daughter, Penny.
All this is recounted by Douglas Yandell, a music critic with his own love problems, who finds that he too has a part in this story of botched artistry, bumbling celebrity, and scheming family, in a time that, for all its high-minded talk, is as low and dishonest as any other.
Critics Review
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“In Girl, 20 the character of whom Amis most disapproves politically is also made irresistibly charming.”
Christopher Hitchens, #1 New York Times bestselling author
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“His rollicking novel about the absurdities of the Sixties.”
Daily Telegraph (London)
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“Sir Roy is a first-class character, possibly Amis’s best.””
New York Times Book Review
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“The cast of characters has been adroitly shaped to expose a sort of folie à deux in which youth and an aging misleader of youth contribute equally to the mischief.”
New York Times
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“Amis’s aim at the modern world, not to mention eternal human foibles, is dead on.”
Los Angeles Times
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“This is Kingsley Amis as you know him best…he manages to strafe the scene with an exactitude of eye and ear which is infallibly and fractiously funny.”
Kirkus Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Kingsley Amis
- Narrator
- Oliver Chris
- Duration
- 7 hours 43 minutes
- Release Date
- 30 May 2023
- ISBN
- 9798212185431
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Genre
- Satirical fiction and parodies, Humorous fiction
Synopsis
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 who has fallen hard for protest, bellbottoms, and the electric guitar. And since vain Sir Vandervane is a great success, he is also free to pursue his greatest failing: a taste for younger and younger women.Highborn hippie Sylvia—not, in fact, twenty—is his latest infatuation and a threat to his whole family, from his drama-queen wife, Kitty, to his long-suffering daughter, Penny.All this is recounted by Douglas Yandell, a music critic with his own love problems, who finds that he too has a part in this story of botched artistry, bumbling celebrity, and scheming family, in a time that, for all its high-minded talk, is as low and dishonest as any other.
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