Success

Newly reissued for the modern reader, Martin Amis’s Success is “a terrifying, painfully funny, Swiftian exercise in moral disgust” (The Observer).

Foster brothers Terence Service and Gregory Riding could not be more different from one another—Terry “a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude” and Greg a “bundle of contempt, vanity and stock-response.”

After the shocking killing of Terry’s child sister, he is taken in by the aristocratic and wealthy Riding family and introduced to his new foster brother and sister, Greg and Ursula. As adults, the two boys unhappily share a tiny apartment in London. Greg spends his days tormenting Terry and engaging in plenty of messy, meaningless sex, while Terry suffers through a dead-end job and exists wholly in his brother’s cold and looming shadow, licking his wounds from a lifetime of romantic and social failures.

Told throughout the course of one year in Terry and Greg’s lives, Success shows just how fickle luck can be, and how quickly one’s life can be totally, horribly changed. With caustic, searing prose, Success is a firecracker revenge story for the ages.