Lionel Asbo, Martin Amis
Lionel Asbo, Martin Amis
List: $25.95 | Sale: $18.16
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Lionel Asbo
State of England

Author: Martin Amis

Narrator: Alex Jennings

Unabridged: 9 hr 2 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download (DRM Protected)

Published: 08/21/2012

Synopsis

A savage, funny, and mysteriously poignant saga by a renowned author at the height of his powers. Lionel Asbo, a terrifying yet weirdly loyal thug (self-named after England's notorious "Anti-Social Behavior Order"), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine. He provides him with fatherly career advice and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls, Internet porn, and all manner of more serious criminality. Des, on the other hand, desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love—and to protect a family secret that could be the death of him. But just as he begins to lead a gentler, healthier life, his uncle—once again in a London prison—wins ┬ú140 million in the lottery and, upon his release, hires a public relations firm and begins dating a cannily ambitious topless model and "poet." Strangely, however, Lionel's true nature remains uncompromised while his problems, and therefore also Desmond's, seem only to multiply.

About Martin Amis

Martin Amis (1949-2023) was an English novelist and screenwriter. His novels Night Train and London Fields made the New York Times bestsellers list. His memoir Experience won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and two of his books were finalists for the Booker Prize. His novel Money was named by London’s The Guardian as one of the top 100 Best Novels Written in English. He was a professor of creative writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011.

About Alex Jennings

Alex Jennings is an award-winning narrator and actor of stage and screen. He has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre. He is also known for his role as Edward VIII, the Duke of Windsor, in the Netflix series The Crown, along with his roles in The Queen, Lady in the Van, and The Wings of the Dove. He is a three-time Olivier Award winner and has been nominated for a BAFTA.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kemper

This book made me such a nervous wreck that I developed a facial tic and had to take antacids while I was reading it. Desmond Pepperdine is a 15 year old lad living in a very rough part of England where life expectancies are short and violence is common. Des is a bright and gentle boy with a big secr......more

Goodreads review by William2

Lionel Asbo is a bad thief. He spends long stretches in jail. He's in and he's out, a recidivist. Lionel's nephew, Desmond, at fifteen years of age, is seduced by his grandmother, Grace, thirty-nine. It is Des's guilt about this incestuous relationship, and his fear of what Uncle Li (pronounced lie)......more

Goodreads review by Maciek

In 1998, British Government (under Tony Blair) introduced the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) - an act which meant to correct minor incidents which would normally not result in criminal punishment - from loudswearing, loitering and beging to public sex and even urban exploration. During the gener......more

Goodreads review by David

Rather than re-hash the plot here, let me say it’s rather prime Amis. Dark and twisted comedy mixed with some tense drama. It harkens back quite a bit to his earliest major success, London Fields. What I’m most interested in considering is the subtitle “State of England.” Many critics seem to dismis......more

Quotes

“Lionel Asbo is at heart an old-fashioned novel, earnest in its agenda...Amis is...an insistently moral writer, satire being an edifying genre with a noble cause: the improvement of society.”
New York Times Book Review

“Amis’ language is electric, his wit as sharp and precise than it has been in a decade, and Lionel Asbo has a savage, post-apocalyptic feel.”
USA Today

“Little fiction is more entertaining than Martin Amis at his pithy best. His latest novel posits plenty of pith and cutting cultural criticism. It is wild. It is whacked. [It] swings between wildly funny and harshly real.” 
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“In his thirteenth novel—one of his most compulsively readable—wily, dead-on satirist and consummate artist Martin Amis is grandly acerbic, funny, and unnerving...He leads us on, shakes us up, knocks us down, brushes us off, then does it all over again...With crisp insights, rollicking storytelling, and acrobatic wit, Amis has created a...hilarious dismantlement of our cherished rags-to-riches fantasy.”
Kansas City Star

“Lionel Asbo bears a strong resemblance to the trio of novels that made Amis’ reputation. Like them, it is a satirical work...and has an elaborate plot, a series of brilliant set pieces and a matchless sense of the contemporary demotic...Lionel Asbo maybe be even better than these ambitious works of fiction, more disciplined, funnier, and more inventive....To say that it is a return to form is an understatement—it might be his finest work.”
Denver Post

“A joy—and strangely life-affirming... It certainly has much of the dazzling prose that made his earlier works so stand-out.”
Times (London)

“[Lionel Asbo] is a great big confidence trick of a novel—an attack that turns into an embrace—a book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely.  It is every inch the novel that we all deserve.”
Guardian (London)

“A wicked satire [and] frequently wincingly funny.  Amis’ aim at the totems and mores of common fame is as unerring, and his phrase-making as pyrotechnically dazzling, as ever…Amis also writes with real—and uncharacteristic—tenderness.”
Telegraph (London)

“A surprisingly tender story.”
Daily Mail (London)

“A ripper of a story, in the Dickens mode... Amis is the most original sentence-writer in English.”
Globe and Mail (Canada)

Awards

  • Slate Magazine Best Book
  • Amazon Top 100 Book
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