The Rachel Papers - Softcover

Amis, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345244303 ISBN 13: 9780345244307

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1975

Synopsis

Charles Highway, a precociously intelligent and highly-sexed teenager, is determined to sleep with an older woman before he turns twenty. Rachel fits the bill perfectly and Charles plans his seduction meticulously. He sets the scene with infinite care -- but it doesn’t come off quite as Charles expects.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

In his uproarious first novel Martin Amis, author of the bestselling London Fields, gave us one of the most noxiously believable -- and curiously touching -- adolescents ever to sniffle and lust his way through the pages of contemporary fiction. On the brink of twenty, Charles High-way preps desultorily for Oxford, cheerfully loathes his father, and meticulously plots the seduction of a girl named Rachel -- a girl who sorely tests the mettle of his cynicism when he finds himself falling in love with her.

From the Back Cover:

Amis's vision of adolescence is an unvarnished, terrifying and hilarious one."-- New Yorker

"A truly sexy and funny book...a delight...the best teenage sex novel since Goodbye Columbus." -- New York

"Amis is a born comic novelist, in the tradition that ranges from Dickens to Waugh...He can find laughter in catastrophe and knows that morality shifts sneakily between absolutes and ambiguity...Amis's mercurial style...can rise to Joycean brilliance."

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1975
• ISBN 10: 0345244303
• ISBN 13: 9780345244307
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback