Time's Arrow

(Paperback)

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Description

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Time's Arrow tells the story, backwards, of the life of Nazi war criminal, Doctor Tod T Friendly. He dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them and mangles his patients before he sends them home...Escaping from the body of the dying doctor who had worked in Nazi concentration camps, the doctor's consciousness begins living the doctor's life backwards, aware only that he is living the life of a horrible man at a horrible place in time.

Reviews

Amis's backwards world is rigorously imagined. It is a world of pathos and cruel hilarity - but the crux, the test of his vision, is what he does with Auschwitz * Guardian *
The devastatingly sustained black irony stands comparison with Swift's A Modest Proposal. It is, I think, Amis's finest achievement to date * Financial Times *
Extraordinary - Ironic inversion is essentially a comic device, but its trickery here yields results that are rigorously grave * Independent on Sunday *
An icy, hard read - Amis is at his intriguing, powerful and heedful best * Time Out *
Amis's most daring and ambitious novel * Daily Telegraph *

Author Bio

Martin Amis is the author of two collections of stories, six works of non-fiction and fourteen novels, most recently The Zone of Interest.