London Fields Audiobook

" this was an unforgettable joy-ride looking back. Witty, sly, black, and mercilessly exposing of pornographic and other male fantasies. Highly recommended. "

" A novel of superbly imaginative concepts and characters completely let down by being overly long, pretentious, ponderous, spiteful and self absorbed. Trim off 200 pages, keep the pace up and cut down on literary and philosophical wankery and this would have been to me the classic it is always claimed. "

" Martin Amis is a jerk, and this is the book of a jerk, and it is a great book. Set in some kind of nebulous post-1990s beset by total ecological collapse (ash-scented air, carnivorous pigeons), the plot centers around a love triangle between Keith the predatory darts champion, Guy the upper-class do-gooder, and Nicola Six, the pathological liar who's plotting her own murder. Full of Amis-like wordplay and truly hateful and endlessly entertaining scenes of cruelty and evil. "

" The phrase that comes to mind is "complex caricature". Characters that border on the Dickensian, a fascinating self appearance with poignant themes. "

" One of the best tales ever told. A good assessment of the men, women and all the craziness that represent these times. "

" Favorite line: Darts, Keith. Darts. "

" Keith Talent has got to be one of the best fictional characters ever devised. This is my favourite Martin Amis book. "

" Martin Amis' prose is spectacular and there was at least one moment on every page where I would say to myself that is really nice writing. I enjoyed the book thoroughly and found the inventions of Keith Talent and Guy Clinch pretty wonderful. "

" Read this back in the 90s. Some powerful stuff here, often very funny. Black comedy/murder mystery for fans of offbeat literary fiction. "

" The characters started out with fascinating quirks and habits, but after a few hundred pages it felt like it kept repeating the same tropes an jokes and I couldn't justify spending any more time on it. "

" I loved this book right away, but got off it somehow and then could never get back into it. I tried for months and eventually had to force myself to conquer it as a matter of principle. I don't really know what my problem was, because I loved every word when I was actually able to get into it. "

" loved this novel... have this exact edition and it is well worn. bought it before my first trip to London in 1990. It may be time to re-visit this book. "

" it's a very writer-ly book, but a good read nonetheless. bleak. but still good. "

" This book was okay, but I got away from it, and then lost interest. It's pretty self aware, and I don't think I ever quite grasped the foreshadowing/plot. In any case, I wasn't that drawn into it, and I have a stack of books by my bed.... "

" messy, funny great book; keeps amis up there with the 2 ians (Mckewan and Banks) as the best of his generation's Emglish writers.. "

" For what it's worth, this is the greatest novel of the waning half of the century of the novel. "

" Even meaner and funnier than Money. He hasn't got a clue about women, but I think that works in this case. "

" Some books have a good language, some books have an interesting plot, some books are just funny. This book has it all, but it has something special: a character you will never forget (Keith Talent). "

" This is my other favorite novel. The British love to bash their best man of letters, but this fellow is magnificent. Every sentence is thought through and identifiably his, which some British critics have tagged him for. Amis has a huge mind and puts it to good use. "

" Would be a much better book if he skipped the quasi-apocalyptic, non-Keith-Talent chapters. Book would be half the length, twice the fun. Keith is comic gold. Amis' other social commentary and dystopian imaginings are plodding and dull. "

" Cold, clinical, verbally dextrous but ultimately vacuous exercise in literary pretentiousness. Either that or I just didn't get it.... "

" I couldn't even get half way through the book, no matter how hard I tried. It was just dull. "

" a compelling, sometimes exhausting tragicomedy about seduction and the force of will. or maybe not. could have taught me more than I ever thought I could know about darts but flew entirely over my head and I doubt it was unintentional. "

" I first read this nearly 20 years ago and, despite Amis' tendency to get a little too cute and to overwrite, it holds up well and is searingly funny. About 70 pages of editorial surgery would have made it nearly perfect. "

" I read this because he's a best friend of Christopher Hitchens. It was smart and perverse with black humour and I couldn't tell whether he was being ironically optimistic or miserable. I think I'm too emotionally unstable to read this guy, either that or I'm too much of a philistine. "

" Some of the most incredible and horrible characters in literature. "

" The most difficult book I've read in a while. The writing was brilliant, the writer's style both precise and unflinching. What made it hard to read were the characters, people so awful that I wanted them out of at least my head, if not just gone. "