Inside Story (novel)
2020 novel by Martin Amis
Inside Story is an autobiographical novel by the English author Martin Amis, published in 2020. It was Amis' final novel to be published before his death in 2023.
Synopsis
The book revolves around a fictionalized account of Amis' relationship with three central figures who have died: Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens. Another central figure, Phoebe Phelps, is entirely fictional, and characterized by a mixture of hyper-sexuality and vulnerability reminiscent of previous female characters written by Amis (e.g. Nicola Six in London Fields, Gloria Prettyman in The Pregnant Widow). The novel begins with Amis welcoming the reader into his home. It is interspersed with sections in which Amis addresses the reader directly and discusses the art of writing. The final part of the novel describes the death of each of the three principal figures (Larkin, Bellow, Hitchens), followed by Amis himself bidding farewell to the reader.
Development
Amis first attempted to write a second memoir (his first being Experience) during his stay in Uruguay, between 2003 and 2006. It was provisionally called Life.
“Inside Story (novel)” enters the record as 2020 novel by Martin Amis. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Inside, Story and novel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q108872449. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020, 2023, 2003 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Inside Story (novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.