Discover our Monthly Spotlight for May: Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis
Throughout May, and one year on from his death in May 2023, we’re celebrating Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, which is our latest Monthly Spotlight title.
Although one of the best-known writers of his generation, Amis was shortlisted for the Booker Prize just once, in 1991, for this highly inventive depiction of a Nazi war criminal whose life story is told in reverse, and which raises big questions about morality and destiny.
In a review of the novel, the New York Times said Amis had written ‘a devastatingly specific portrait of the Nazis’ warped mentality’ in an ‘upside-down, backward world’.
Despite publishing 15 novels throughout his career, Amis, perhaps surprisingly, never bagged a Booker, or quite managed to shake off comparisons with his Booker Prize-winning father, Kingsley Amis.
In an essay for the Booker Prizes website, 2020 Booker judge Sameer Rahim asks why the big literary accolades eluded Amis. If you’d like to know more, you can read Sameer’s essay over on our Monthly Spotlight page, alongside an extract from the novel and a detailed reading guide. And don’t forget to enter our competition to win a copy of the book and a money-can’t-buy Booker Prize tote bag. Good luck, and happy reading!