Inside Story

Martin Amis's most intimate and epic work yet had its birth in the death of his closest friend, Christopher Hitchens, and it is within that profound and sprawling friendship that this autobiographical novel unfurls. Hitch was Amis's wingman and adviser from their early days as young magazine staffers in London through years of literary gossip, romantic entanglements, and unsettling obsessions. As Inside Story traces other significant influences in Amis's life--including his father, Kingsley Amis; his hero, Saul Bellow; the poet Philip Larkin; and the writers Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard--it evolves into a tender, witty exploration of the hardest questions: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die. The result is a love letter to life--and to the people in his life--that opens up a previously unseen portrait of a writer's extraordinary world. WITH 20 ILLUSTRATIONS