Start with Lucky Jim. It is his first novel, it is 250-odd pages, most people finish it in three sittings, and it is the book everything else in his career is measured against — including by him. Beginning anywhere else means reading Amis without the comic register that makes the later cruelty legible.
The alternative people reach for is The Old Devils, because it won the Booker Prize in 1986 and is arguably the better book. It is also a novel about old men who have known each other for fifty years, written by a novelist who had been working for thirty. Read it first and it is merely bleak; read it last and it is the payoff.
One point of order before anything else: this is Kingsley Amis, not his son. The two are constantly confused in catalogues and in conversation, and everything on this path is the father's. If you wanted the son, Martin Amis is a separate writer with a separate style.
Start here
Lucky Jim and That uncertain feeling are both short, fast and best read within a fortnight of each other, because the second only makes its point while the first is fresh. Lucky Jim is the campus comedy that invented the genre in Britain; That uncertain feeling moves the same trapped, resentful, faintly dishonest young man into a Welsh library and a bad marriage.
The comic novels of the sixties
Take a Girl Like You is the longest of this group and the one to slow down for, particularly its final forty pages, which turn much darker than the comedy has prepared you for. One Fat Englishman is short enough for a weekend. Girl, 20 is a late-sixties satire about a conductor chasing youth.
Say the obvious thing here rather than letting a reader discover it mid-chapter: the sexual politics of these books are of their moment and are frequently ugly, and Amis's reputation for misogyny is an argument that has run for sixty years without resolving. Whether the novels are diagnosing the attitude or sharing it is a judgement readers genuinely split on. Knowing that in advance is more useful than being ambushed by it.
The genre detours
Two short books, both worth the diversion. The Green Man is a real ghost story with a drunk innkeeper narrator, and it works best read partly at night. The Alteration is alternate history — a twentieth century in which the Reformation never happened — and rewards slower reading because the world arrives in passing details rather than exposition.
Late Amis, which is the best of him
Ending up is very short and very cold, five old people sharing a cottage. Jake's Thing is quick and uncomfortable and, again, will not read as harmless. The old devils is the longest and the richest: give it three weeks, and read the drinking scenes slowly, because that is where the characterisation actually happens.
Amis in his own voice
Memoirs is not a continuous autobiography but a set of self-contained portraits of people he knew, best taken two or three at a sitting. Note that our catalogue stores it in capitals as a bare record — it is simply Memoirs, published in 1991. The King's English is an alphabetical book about usage and can be browsed or read straight at twenty pages a day. It is also the clearest surviving statement of the opinions, linguistic and otherwise, that hardened as he moved rightward across his life.
Where to stop
Twelve books is a full working knowledge of Amis and more than most readers need. If you only have room for four, take Lucky Jim, The Green Man, Ending up and The old devils — beginning, detour, distillation and summit.
Follow the full ordered path here: Kingsley Amis Reading Order: Where to Start.
