Lionel Asbo

“Lionel Asbo is at heart an old-fashioned novel, earnest in its agenda...Amis is...an insistently moral writer, satire being an edifying genre with a noble cause: the improvement of society.”

“Amis’ language is electric, his wit as sharp and precise than it has been in a decade, and Lionel Asbo has a savage, post-apocalyptic feel.”

“Little fiction is more entertaining than Martin Amis at his pithy best. His latest novel posits plenty of pith and cutting cultural criticism. It is wild. It is whacked. [It] swings between wildly funny and harshly real.” 

“In his thirteenth novel—one of his most compulsively readable—wily, dead-on satirist and consummate artist Martin Amis is grandly acerbic, funny, and unnerving...He leads us on, shakes us up, knocks us down, brushes us off, then does it all over again...With crisp insights, rollicking storytelling, and acrobatic wit, Amis has created a...hilarious dismantlement of our cherished rags-to-riches fantasy.”

“Lionel Asbo bears a strong resemblance to the trio of novels that made Amis’ reputation. Like them, it is a satirical work...and has an elaborate plot, a series of brilliant set pieces and a matchless sense of the contemporary demotic...Lionel Asbo maybe be even better than these ambitious works of fiction, more disciplined, funnier, and more inventive....To say that it is a return to form is an understatement—it might be his finest work.”

“A joy—and strangely life-affirming... It certainly has much of the dazzling prose that made his earlier works so stand-out.”

“[Lionel Asbo] is a great big confidence trick of a novel—an attack that turns into an embrace—a book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely.  It is every inch the novel that we all deserve.”

“A wicked satire [and] frequently wincingly funny.  Amis’ aim at the totems and mores of common fame is as unerring, and his phrase-making as pyrotechnically dazzling, as ever…Amis also writes with real—and uncharacteristic—tenderness.”

“A surprisingly tender story.”

“A ripper of a story, in the Dickens mode... Amis is the most original sentence-writer in English.”

“Technically brilliant, dazzling in style, manic in energy, and driven by a narrative momentum impossible to resist... The novel is full of Amis’ trademark virtuoso prose and wit.”

“Amis’ funniest and most satisfying novel in years—the book’s comedy [lashed] with a serious dose of menace... his warmest book—and also his most authentically chilling... Among its other surprises, Lionel Asbo delivers the most compelling plot Amis has crafted.”

“A masterpiece of social satire and cultural observation...fine, caustic, funny, angry, and outrageous.” 

“One of Amis’ funniest novels...Amis, like his heroes Nabokov and Bellow, writes exuberant, ecstatic prose.  His ear is precisely tuned, and his sentences—in narration and dialogue—are lethal.”

“Amis pumps his novel full of heart and warmth, providing an unexpected reward for readers.”

“As combative and as vicious as ever, Amis skewers the noughties as cruelly, as inventively, and with as much screwy black comedy as his Money did the eighties.”

“Lionel Asbo crackles with brilliant prose and scathing satire...Amis adopts a big, playful storytelling voice in this book.  He riffs like a jazz master, in and out of vernacular, with brief gusts of description, all driven by a tight bass line of suspense.” 

“Jennings’ portrayals of Lionel and his circle are tremendous fun.”

“Amis’ phenomenal vim and versatility, anchoring roots in English literature, and gift for satire power this hilariously Dickensian, nerve-racking, crafty, bull’s eye tale of a monster and a mensch…This deliciously shivery, sly, and taunting page-turner provokes a fresh assessment of the poverty of place, mind, and spirit and the wondrous blossoming of against-all-odds goodness.”