Where to start with Martin Amis: The style, satire and the savage beauty of language

With writers you grew up reading, their departure leaves a space in your life that is as close to an ache as books and literature can get. That’s how I feel about Martin Amis.

Amis, who died in 2023 at the age of 73 from cancer, was one of Britain’s most distinctive and dazzling literary voices. The son of Kingsley Amis, author of Lucky Jim, he forged his own reputation as a bold stylist and razor-sharp satirist, chronicling the absurdities and moral disintegration of late 20th-century life with wit, intellect and a signature swagger.

Whatever happened to Douglas Coupland?

Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X didn’t just name a demographic—it captured a mindset. His fiction defined the detached, drifting, hyper-aware sensibility of 1990s youth culture. Generation X was also published 34 years ago. 

He gave us slackers before they were memeable, office ennui before The Office, and a sense that we were all increasingly plugged in and alienated. 

He was prolific for many years, publishing thirteen novels between 1991 and 2013—six of them in his first ten years.

But it’s now been more than a decade since his last novel, Worst. Person. Ever. It was published in 2013. So… what happened?