Girl, 20

First edition. Crown 8vo. Pp. 253, [3 (blank)]. Black cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine; cerise top-stain. Bill Botten-designed dustwrapper, bears two paragraphs of text, rather than three, and no price printed to unclipped front flap, followed by adverts for a couple of Amis titles – I Want It Now & The Green Man – to rear flap, plus author's photo by Mark Gerson to back panel. Possibly intended for distribution to the Commonwealth. Dustwrapper sustains two 1/2" closed tears on upper front and rear panels, else Fine.

A conductor-composer and pillar of the establishment champions fashionable causes while indulging his taste for ever-younger women in swinging late '60s London, to the dismay of his long-suffering wife. Author's ninth novel is "vintage Amis, acidly funny [and] shamelessly entertaining". According to his biographer, Zachary Leader, Amis was "the finest British comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century." In 2008, The Times ranked him ninth on their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. "Not only a very funny book, it also hits dozens of nails smartly on the head." –The Observer