In conversation with Martin Amis Part 2: The new novel

In this second extract from Toby Muse's interview with Martin Amis at the Hay Festival in Cartegena, Amis tells Prospect about his work-in-progress The Pregnant Widow (part one of the interview can be viewed here). As Amis explains, the book's title is a reference to the "long night of chaos and desolation" that he believes followed the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Although subsequent generations make take what Amis describes as "the rise of women, feminism, sexual revolution et cetera" for granted, people of his age are still struggling to understand the revolution they lived through.



Also, in a web-exclusive piece this month, Prospect's arts and books editor, Tom Chatfield, explains why Amis's new book could be a return to his best form (not to mention the literary terrain he made his own in the 1980s and 1990s—sexuality, masculinity, humiliation and social change) after his more equivocal recent explorations of Islamic extremism and communism. As Amis himself put it in the introduction to his most recent volume of collected prose, The Second Plane, "Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is."