Martin Amis author and his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, the autobiography nevertheless deals with many facets of Amis's life. Of particular note is Amis's reunion with his daughter, Delilah Seale, resulting from an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19. Amis also discusses, at some length, the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred West when she was 21. The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. In 2002 Amis published "", a devastating history of the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, and their denial by many writers and academics
Kingsley Amis mark much of his work in the 1960s and 1970s. His departure from the strict realism of his early comedic novels is not so abrupt as might first appear. He had avidly read science fiction since a boy and developed that interest into the Christian Gauss Lectures of 1958, while visiting Princeton University. The lectures were published in that year as "New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction". This was a serious, yet light-handed treatment of what the genre had to say about man and society. Amis was especially keen on the dystopian works of Frederik Pohl and