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  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446419847
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352

You Can't Do Both




'Has you moved to tears. Amis amazes at every turn - A masterpiece from a master' Mail on Sunday

Robin Davies knows how to look after number one. Raised in a bland suburb of South London in the 1930s, Robin longs for the freedom to do what he wants. When he escapes to study in Oxford, he meets Nancy Bennett, a young woman even less worldly than himself. As Robin stumbles through his rites of passage to adulthood, involving rebellion, self-discovery, sex, war, seduction and the threat of commitment, we come to realise just how far he will go to have his cake and eat it.

  • Published: 1 February 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446419847
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352

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 You Can't Do Both

Acutely and poignantly observed-there is still fire in the old devil's belly

Daily Telegraph

As finely judged, as exactly observed, as vividly conceived as anything he has written

The Times

Funny, touching, well-constructed, sharply evocative of time and place and written with characteristic Amisian aplomb. It is a first class addition to his oeuvre

Spectator

Will have you whooping with delight

John Osborne, Literary Review