The Rachel Papers

(Paperback)

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Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and Martin Amis's celebrated first novel. Charles Highway, a precociously intelligent and highly sexed teenager, is determined to sleep with an older woman before he turns twenty. Rachel fits the bill perfectly and Charles plans his seduction meticulously, sets the scene with infinite care - but it doesn't come off quite as Charles expects...

Reviews

Amis has brought off the feat of satirizing his contemporaries while making them both funny and, in a bizarre way, moving -- Peter Ackroyd
Scurrilous, shameless and very funny * Times Literary Supplement *
Amis's arrogantly assured manner is a formidable weapon, spraying the target with disdainful wit, ingenious obscenity, astute literariness, loathing, lust, anxiety and an all-pervading hyper-self-consciousness * Observer *
Extravagantly sexual...highly enjoyable * Evening Standard *

Author Bio

Martin Amis is the author of fourteen novels, two collections of stories and eight works of non-fiction. His novel Time's Arrow was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for which his subsequent novel Yellow Dog was also longlisted, and his memoir Experience won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest writers since 1945. He lives in New York.