The Old Devils (NYRB Classics, Used)

The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis / ISBN 9781590175767 / 320-page paperback from New York Review of Books Classics

Used copy, light shelfwear only.

***

A pub gathering of elderly married couples devolves into mischief in this “sharp and funny” British comedy about marriage, aging, and friendship (The Washington Post)

Booker Prize Winner

Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably.

Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement--a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”--The Old Devils confronts the attrition of ageing with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.