Martin Amis by Maximilian Schoenherr, Creative Commons

The British author I reckon writes the best, sentence-for-sentence, over the last 40 years has to be Martin Amis. As a prose stylist, he’s superb.

Amis found fame with his first book, a comic novel called The Rachel Papers in 1973 when he was just 24. Somewhat uniquely, he won the Somerset Maugham award for a first novel exactly as his father, Kingsley Amis, had with his own first novel Lucky Jim in 1954, published when he was 32. Continue reading →

Irvine Welsh by Mariusz Kubik

Forget Trainspotting the movie, with its silly surreal scenes of deep diving into a filthy toilet and a baby’s head rotating through 360 degrees.

Trainspotting (1993) the novel was a darker, more disturbing story altogether, a tale told by multiple narrators that plumbed incredible lows, delivered at exhilarating pace in challenging phonetic dialect.

And reading it blew the lid off my understanding of how novels could be narrated. Continue reading →