Lionel Asbo

Terrific... Both funny and serious, and (as always wth Amis) very very on-the-money'

Richard Ford

This is classic Amis

Sunday Herald

The novel is something of a joy...he makes the dreadful funny, the grotesque poetic

The Times

It's a Big Mac made from filet mignon… It is a book of lovehate. It is a powershake... 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.

Observer

The broadest comedy he has ever published… Lionel is a fantastic brute… I laughed a lot. Amis’s delight in the incorrigible is genuinely Dickensian… This is a verbally inventive comedy…to be enjoyed in the same spirit as Little Britain… It’s a hoot

Evening Standard

I read the book in a sitting, chortling throughout…with its swaggering prose and undertow of quiet pathos, this book marks a return to something not far short of Amis’s best

Mail on Sunday

He remains one of the most interesting authors we have, not least for continually engaging with those areas in the life of a nation which journalists and politicians tip-toe around

Independent on Sunday

It had me roaring with laughter

Independent

Being an Amis novel it’s not without the odd good joke, and he is, of course, incapable of writing and inelegant line. It’s almost as if he alone can sense both the golden ratio of a sentence, and its perfect rhythm: it’s like he’s Michelangelo and Keith Moon

Sunday Telegraph

Full of hilarious set-pieces, wisecracks and wordplay.

Daily Express

Smart, with plenty of lovable lowlifes, and biting satire

Sun

Amis proves he's as combative and as vicious as ever, skewering the noughties as cruelly, as inventively and with as much screwy black comedy as he did in Money did the Eighties

This is Amis’ most enjoyable book for years

Mail on Sunday

Powerful and authentic

Guardian

Thronged with well-drawn caricatures, this is more of an entertaining farce than a ‘state of England’ satire

Financial Times