Money

"What I normally do when I love an author is I’ll read everything of theirs. This was my Martin Amis phase, and I read them in order, which was a fascinating thing to do. When I got to Money , he’d really hit his stride, with that very direct writing. A lot of my female friends don’t like Martin Amis because they feel he’s a misogynist and he’s just too unapologetic but I adore him because of that. He is the male laid bare and the ability to write like that…I don’t know if it’s unconscious, but to write in such a revealing way about the male psyche is fascinating to read. That aspect really took over his writing, and after Money I think, from reviews, he became more conscious of it, how it got a lot of women’s backs up. Money is just about at that tipping point for me. Money is a proper 360-degree landscape of the 1980s. With some novels set in the 1980s, you feel the author just Googled 1980s and what was popular. Money was published in 1984, so you can really be right bang there without being a tourist. It really captures that drug-fuelled and utterly shameless era. It’s a brilliant novel. I could have chosen Bonfire of the Vanities instead, another 1980s state-of-the-nation novel that uses greed as its spine but it’s set in the US, and I wanted to be more UK-focused."