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Girl, 20 Audiobook
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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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"Excellent book and very well read, I toughly enjoyed it. I couldn't wait to get in from work and listen to a couple of chapters every night it was a great story but a very talented author. "
— ukflyb0y (5 out of 5 stars)
Quotes
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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 -
“His rollicking novel about the absurdities of the Sixties.”
— Daily Telegraph (London) -
“Sir Roy is a first-class character, possibly Amis’s best.””
— New York Times Book Review -
“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 -
“Amis’s aim at the modern world, not to mention eternal human foibles, is dead on.”
— Los Angeles Times -
“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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About Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was a popular and prolific British novelist, poet, satirist, and critic. Lucky Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a Somerset Maugham Award. Ultimately he published twenty-four novels, including science fiction and a James Bond sequel; more than a dozen collections of poetry, short stories, and literary criticism; restaurant reviews and three books about drinking; political pamphlets and a memoir; and more. He received the Booker Prize for his novel The Old Devils in 1986 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.
About Oliver Chris
Oliver Chris is a voice talent and audiobook narrator.