> Skip to content
  • Published: 1 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099437338
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $24.99

Dead Babies



A new reissue series of Martin Amis's novels to mark his 70th birthday

Six friends are determined to escape for a debauched weekend in the country

Blitzed on uppers, downers, blue movies and bellinis, the six twenty-something friends ensconced at Appleseed Rectory for the weekend are reeling in an hallucinatory haze of sex and seduction.

But mysterious ‘Johnny’ begins to unsettle the other guests. And as Friday melts into Saturday and Saturday spirals into Sunday and sobriety sets in, the romp descends into something altogether more sinister.

'It's transfixing - At first it's funny. It teases, exaggerates, deliberates. Then it becomes ferocious, stricken, moving' The Times
‘Very funny, extremely clever’ Guardian

  • Published: 1 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099437338
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Martin Amis

Martin Amis was the author of fourteen novels, two collections of stories and eight works of non-fiction. His novel Time’s Arrow was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for which his subsequent novel Yellow Dog was also longlisted, and his memoir Experience won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest writers since 1945. Amis died in May 2023.

Also by Martin Amis

See all

Praise for Dead Babies

Sparkling might not be the first adjective that springs to mind to describe a novel packed with the concentrated disgust which Dead Babies contains. Nevertheless, Martin Amis's version of the bleak and wrecky future that awaits a sex-and-drug-addicted society is so fizzing with style, so busy with verbal inventiveness, that the adjective is impelled upon one

Julian Barnes

A fine piece of comic-writing

Times literary supplement

Very funny, extremely clever

Guardian

Viciously funny, at once a hilarious joke and a technical triumph

Financial Times