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Martin Amis was 24 when his first novel, The Rachel Papers, won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974, the same prize his father Kingsley had won with Lucky Jim. By 27 he was literary editor of the New Statesman. In 1995 the £500,000 advance for The Information made him the most talked-about writer in Britain, for reasons that had little to do with his sentences. He wrote fifteen novels, about London, money, sex, the Holocaust and the Gulag, and in 2024 a film loosely based on one of them won two Oscars. This guide covers his 14 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 14 key books · 1973–2020 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Martin Amis published fifteen novels between 1973 and 2020. The best known are Money (1984), London Fields (1989), Time’s Arrow (1991), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Zone of Interest (2014); his memoir Experience (2000) won the James Tait Black Prize. Start with Money, then read on for the order of the rest and which books belong together.
Where to Start with Martin Amis
If you want his defining novel
→ Money (1984) — John Self’s 1980s, between London and New York.
If you want something short and formally daring
→ Time’s Arrow (1991) — a life told backwards, shortlisted for the Booker.
If you want the book behind the Oscar-winning film
→ The Zone of Interest (2014).
If you want the man himself
→ Experience (2000) — his memoir of his father, his teeth and his losses.
14 Martin Amis Books, in Order
The Rachel Papers
Charles Highway, on the eve of his twentieth birthday, looks back over the year in London when he crammed for the Oxford entrance exam and set out to seduce a girl called Rachel. The book won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974 and was filmed in 1989.
Dead Babies
A group of young people spend a weekend of drugs, drink and cruelty at a country house, Appleseed Rectory, while a mysterious figure plans violence against them. A blackly comic second novel, filmed in 2000.
Other People
A young woman wakes in a hospital with no memory, gives herself the name Mary Lamb and has to learn the city and other people from scratch, while a narrator who seems to know her past watches. Its real subject is who she used to be.
Money
John Self, a director of television commercials, shuttles between London and New York in 1981 to make his first feature film, drinking, eating and spending his way through the deal; a writer called Martin Amis appears as a character. Robert McCrum placed it on his list of the 100 best novels in English. BBC television adapted it in 2010 with Nick Frost.
London Fields
London in 1999: Nicola Six knows she will be murdered and picks her killer from two men, the darts-playing cheat Keith Talent and the wealthy Guy Clinch, while a dying American writer, Samson Young, narrates. It was left off the 1989 Booker shortlist after a dispute on the panel over its treatment of women. It was filmed in 2018.
Time’s Arrow
The life of a Nazi doctor told in reverse, from his death in America back to his birth, by a consciousness inside him that does not understand what it is seeing: hospitals that injure people, and a camp that seems to create them. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991.
The Information
Richard Tull, a failing London novelist turning forty, sets out to ruin his old friend Gwyn Barry, whose bland novels have made him rich and famous. The £500,000 advance, and Amis’s move from his agent Pat Kavanagh to Andrew Wylie, drew a storm of press hostility and a rift with Kavanagh’s husband, Julian Barnes.
Night Train
Detective Mike Hoolihan, a woman police officer in an unnamed American city, investigates the death of Jennifer Rockwell, an apparently happy young astrophysicist who has shot herself. A short novel in the form of a police procedural; it was filmed as Out of Blue (2018).
Experience
A memoir built around the 1990s: the death of his father Kingsley in 1995, the end of his first marriage, and his cousin Lucy Partington, murdered by Fred and Rosemary West. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.
Yellow Dog
After a blow to the head, the actor and writer Xan Meo turns from a gentle family man into a brute, in a London of tabloid journalism, pornography and a royal family hit by scandal. Longlisted for the Booker Prize.
House of Meetings
An old Russian man writes to his American stepdaughter about the slave-labour camp north of the Arctic Circle where he and his half-brother Lev were held after the Second World War, and about Zoya, the woman they both loved. It follows his non-fiction book on Stalin, Koba the Dread (2002).
The Pregnant Widow
In the summer of 1970, the student Keith Nearing spends a holiday at a castle in Italy with his girlfriend and her friends, as the sexual revolution reaches them; the older Keith looks back on what it cost.
The Zone of Interest
Auschwitz in 1942, told by three narrators: an SS officer, Angelus Thomsen, who falls for the commandant’s wife; the commandant, Paul Doll; and Szmul, head of a Sonderkommando. Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. Jonathan Glazer’s film, loosely based on it, won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2023 and the Oscars for best international feature and best sound in 2024.
Inside Story
His last book, a “novelised autobiography” in which Amis writes about himself, his love affairs and the deaths of his friends and mentors, among them Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin and Christopher Hitchens.
In What Order to Read Martin Amis
None of the novels continue one another, so you can read in any order. Three are often grouped as a loose London trilogy, each about a man in middle age in the city: Money (1984), London Fields (1989) and The Information (1995).
Two other pairs belong together. Time’s Arrow and The Zone of Interest are both about the Holocaust, written 23 years apart. Experience and Inside Story are both about his own life, the first as memoir and the second as fiction, and both are full of his father, Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens.
A reading path
1. Money (1984)
2. Time’s Arrow (1991)
3. London Fields (1989)
4. Experience (2000)
5. The Zone of Interest (2014)
Everything Else Martin Amis Published
Beyond the 14 key books: 11 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other novels
2
2 books · 1978–2012
- 1978Successtwo foster brothers in London, one rising and one falling
- 2012Lionel Asbo: State of Englanda young thug from a fictional London borough wins the lottery
Short story collections
2
2 books · 1987–1998
- 1987Einstein’s Monstersstories about nuclear weapons
- 1998Heavy Water and Other Storiesshort stories
Non-fiction
7
7 books · 1982–2017
- 1982Invasion of the Space Invadersa guide to arcade video games
- 1986The Moronic Infernoessays on America
- 1993Visiting Mrs Nabokovjournalism and profiles
- 2001The War Against Clichéessays and reviews, 1971–2000; National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism
- 2002Koba the Dreadon Stalin and the Great Terror
- 2008The Second Planeessays and stories on 9/11 and after
- 2017The Rub of Timeessays and reportage
The years · 1949–2023
Quick facts about Martin Amis
- Known for
- Martin Amis is known for comic, voice-driven novels about money, sex and violence in late twentieth-century London, and for two novels about the Holocaust.
- 1949
- Born in Oxford
- 1984
- Money
- 1991
- Time’s Arrow on the Booker shortlist
- 2000
- Experience
- 2023
- Dies in Florida; knighted posthumously
- Born
- 25 August 1949, Oxford, England
- Father
- The novelist Kingsley Amis
- Education
- Exeter College, Oxford, first in English
- Worked
- The Times Literary Supplement, then literary editor of the New Statesman
- Married
- Antonia Phillips (1984–1993); the writer Isabel Fonseca (1996)
- Honours
- Knighted in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours, after his death
- Died
- 19 May 2023, Lake Worth Beach, Florida, of oesophageal cancer
The red mark is 1984: Money, the novel most often named as his best.
How Martin Amis Writes: Voice First
Amis built his novels on voice rather than plot. He said that “plots really matter only in thrillers” and that “if the voice doesn’t work you’re screwed”. Money is told entirely in John Self’s voice; London Fields and The Information are run by narrators who comment on everyone, including themselves.
He liked to break the frame. A character called Martin Amis turns up in Money; Time’s Arrow runs a whole life backwards so that the reader sees the crimes before the narrator does; The Zone of Interest splits Auschwitz between three voices, one of them the commandant’s. His father Kingsley disliked this, accusing him of “buggering about with the reader”.
His models were Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, both of whom he wrote about at length, in Visiting Mrs Nabokov, Experience and Inside Story. For writers who play with style and narrators in the same way, see Authors like Vladimir Nabokov.
Frequently asked questions about Martin Amis’s books
How many books has Martin Amis written?
About 25: fifteen novels, two main short-story collections and eight books of non-fiction, including the memoir Experience. This page lists 14 key books (13 novels and Experience); the rest are under “Everything else”.
What are Martin Amis’s books in order?
The key books are The Rachel Papers (1973), Dead Babies (1975), Other People (1981), Money (1984), London Fields (1989), Time’s Arrow (1991), The Information (1995), Night Train (1997), Experience (2000), Yellow Dog (2003), House of Meetings (2006), The Pregnant Widow (2010), The Zone of Interest (2014) and Inside Story (2020). The other two novels are Success (1978) and Lionel Asbo (2012).
Where should I start with Martin Amis?
Money (1984), his best-known novel and the clearest example of his comic voice. If you want something shorter, try Time’s Arrow.
What is Martin Amis’s most famous book?
Money (1984), followed by London Fields (1989). Since Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film, The Zone of Interest (2014) has also become widely known.
Is The Zone of Interest film based on Martin Amis’s novel?
Loosely. Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film keeps the setting, the commandant’s household beside Auschwitz, but drops most of the novel’s plot and characters. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes and, in March 2024, the Oscars for best international feature and best sound.
Which Martin Amis books have been adapted?
The Rachel Papers (film, 1989), Dead Babies (film, 2000), Money (BBC television, 2010), London Fields (film, 2018), Night Train (as Out of Blue, 2018) and The Zone of Interest (film, 2023).
Did Martin Amis win the Booker Prize?
No. Time’s Arrow was shortlisted in 1991 and Yellow Dog longlisted in 2003. He won the Somerset Maugham Award for The Rachel Papers, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Experience and the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for The War Against Cliché.
Is Martin Amis still alive?
No. He died of oesophageal cancer on 19 May 2023 at his home in Lake Worth Beach, Florida, aged 73. He was knighted in the King’s Birthday Honours the following month, backdated to before his death.
Was Martin Amis related to Kingsley Amis?
Yes, he was the son of the novelist Kingsley Amis. Both won the Somerset Maugham Award with their first novels, and Experience is largely about their relationship.
Why was Martin Amis controversial?
Several times. In 1995 the £500,000 advance for The Information and his move to the agent Andrew Wylie drew press hostility and ended his friendship with Julian Barnes. In 2006 remarks about Muslims in an interview with The Times Magazine were criticised by, among others, the critic Terry Eagleton and the satirist Chris Morris. Koba the Dread (2002) also led to a public dispute with Christopher Hitchens, which Amis said did not damage their friendship.
Footnotes
- Martin Amis — Wikipedia
- Martin Amis, era-defining British novelist, dies aged 73 — The Irish Times, 2023
- Martin Amis (1949–2023) — Legacy.com
- The late Martin Amis knighted in the King’s Birthday Honours — Exeter College, Oxford
- Cliché War Prized — The Martin Amis Web
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.”
— Martin Amis, The Information (1995), the opening line
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