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The Old Devils Audiobook
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A pub gathering of elderly married couples devolves into mischief in this “sharp and funny” British comedy about marriage, aging, and friendship.
Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably.
Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement—a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”—The Old Devils confronts the attrition of aging with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.
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“Kingsley Amis’s most ambitious book is neither a sendup nor an exercise in some established genre. It sets forth a large cast of characters rendered in depth as well as on the surface. The Old Devils is also Mr. Amis’s most inclusive novel, encompassing kinds of feelings and tone that move from sardonic gloom to lyric tenderness.”
— New York Times
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“The Old Devils is welcome evidence that the master remains masterful, able now to conjoin the mischievous with the mellow. As always, he is an insightful guide through the terrain where what is said is not meant and what is felt is not said, but where much of life is lived.”
— Los Angeles Times -
“The book is, of course, highly comic in parts, but it is not a cozy read. The comedy has a crematorium whiff, dealing with such unmentionable topics as death, old age, hate, the ghastliness of marriages, the awfulness of the Welsh, and the decay of the flesh.”
— The Times (UK) -
“The old, robust masculine tradition of British comedy from Fielding and Smollett continues in our own vernacular.”
— The New Yorker -
”Amis once again transforms insult, ridicule, and reaction into high comic art.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
“Amis’ comedy of manners in the golden years is by turns sad and wicked, poignant and raucous, but always marvelously entertaining and affecting.”
— Booklist
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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.