The Second Plane

A powerful, urgent, and unflinching exploration of terror, power, and the fragile line between security and freedom in a post-9/11 world.

“That second plane looked eagerly alive,” Martin Amis wrote, “galvanized with malice, and wholly alien.”

The Second Plane brings Martin Amis’s piercing gaze to the events of September 11, 2001—a day that split the modern world in two. Moving between fiction and nonfiction, Amis grapples with the complexities of blame, the psychology of violence, and the global consequences of a world irrevocably altered by extremism.

From imagining the last moments of the hijacker Mohamed Atta to political dispatches and reflections on collective memory, Martin Amis writes with irony, precision, and bracing moral force about one of the most difficult moments in recent history. Measured yet urgent, The Second Plane stands as Amis’s lucid testament to an age defined by terror, ideology, and the stories we tell to endure dark times.