> Skip to content
[]
  • Published: 31 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9781446401613
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208

House of Meetings




A new reissue series of Martin Amis's novels to mark his 70th birthday


‘The best thing Martin Amis has done in fiction for years’ Literary Review
There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night, with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic.

House of Meetings
is about one such liaison. It is a triangular romance: two brothers fall in love with the same girl, a nineteen-year-old Jewess, in Moscow, which is poised for pogrom in the gap between the war and the death of Stalin. Both brothers are arrested, and their rivalry slowly complicates itself over a decade in the slave camp above the Arctic Circle.

‘It is difficult not to be impressed by this compact tour de force’ Observer

  • Published: 31 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9781446401613
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208

About the author

Martin Amis

Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century – in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience – he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.

Also by Martin Amis

See all

Praise for House of Meetings

This novella is the best thing Martin Amis has done in fiction for years: very complex, very forceful, startling in the amount of ground it covers, and densely and intelligently put together

Literary Review

A singular, unimpeachable triumph

The Economist

I read it as slowly as I could. I savoured every page, like sucking the mints from my hotel's reception down to shards. I tried to keep from finishing it, but couldn't help myself, and cursed when the book was done

An ambitious feat...the result is brilliant

Independent

A compelling work of fiction in which learning and imagination are beautifully counterpoised

New Statesman

This is Amis writing at the pitch he has reached in Money...remarkable

Times Literary Supplement

The novel has a cumulative power and resonates with many reflections about the course of individual destiny in a profoundly cruel universe

The Times

Unmistakably Amis's best novel since London Fields...a slender, moving novel, streaked with dark comedy

Sunday Times

Undeniably, distinctively identifiable, vintage Martin

Independent on Sunday

It is difficult not to be impressed by this compact tour de force... Amis has produced a memorable novel and a memorable protagonist

Observer