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  • Published: 3 December 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099512172
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $35.00

Jake's Thing




A powerful read brought back to life; surprising, honest and witty at every turn.

Jake Richardson, an Oxford don nearing sixty with a lifetime's lechery behind him, is in pursuit of his lost libido and heads off to the consulting room of a miniature sex therapist. Not one to disobey a doctor's orders, he runs the full humiliating gamut of sex labs and trendy 'workshops', where more than souls are bared. He decks himself with cunning gadgetry, dreams up a weekly fantasy, pets diligently with his overweight wife and browses listlessly through porn magazines behind locked doors. Is sex really worth it? As liberationists abuse him, a campus hostess bores him into bed - and even his own wife starts acting oddly - Jake seriously begins to wonder.

  • Published: 3 December 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099512172
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $35.00

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 Jake's Thing

Amis amazes at every turn

Mail on Sunday

A great storyteller, although he was much more than a storyteller

Keith Waterhouse

He was a genuine comic writer, probably the best after P. G. Wodehouse-He had a lasting influence and was a very good novelist

John Mortimer

In these explicit days, Mr Amis is the laureate of the unsayable, the literary it man

Sunday Telegraph