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  • Published: 12 June 2012
  • ISBN: 9780241956847
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99

Lucky Jim




New edition of the Penguin Essential of the best satire ever written

'His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as a mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.'

Jix Dixon has a terrible job at a second-rate university. His life is full of things he could happily do without: the tedious and ridiculous Professor Welch, a neurotic and unstable girlfriend, Margaret, burnt sheets, medieval recorder music and over-enthusiastic students. If he can just deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England', a moderately successful career surely awaits him. But without luck, life is never simple . . .

  • Published: 12 June 2012
  • ISBN: 9780241956847
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis has been described as 'the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century'. Born in 1922, he wrote over twenty novels, including Lucky Jim (1954), winner of the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction, The Old Devils (1986), which won the Booker Prize, and The Biographer's Moustache (1995). He also published several collections of short stories, poetry and non-fiction. Amis was awarded a CBE in 1981 and received a knighthood in 1990. He died in 1995.

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Praise for Lucky Jim

A brilliant and preposterously funny book

Guardian

It has always made me laugh out loud . . . a flawless comic novel'

Helen Dunmore, The Times

A seminal campus novel

David Lodge