The Pregnant Widow

In the heat-soaked summer of 1970, twenty-year-old Keith Nearing, a literature-obsessed student navigates the confusing new freedoms of love and lust during a holiday in an Italian castle. Dazzled by beautiful women, and torn between the romantic and cynical sides of his nature, Keith is swept along by a cultural revolution whose consequences he—and the novel—are still reckoning with decades later.

Returning to the era and the milieu of Martin Amis's youthful breakout novels, The Pregnant Widow looks back, with pain and ardor, on a moment when social upheaval seemed to offer boundless sexual freedom and delivered something more complicated. This is a novel about the unfinished business of the twentieth century—a reckoning with the promises of feminism, the delusions of youth, and the ravages of time.