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  • Published: 25 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141961880
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

The Folks That Live On The Hill




Amis's elegant précis on desire and duty, love and loyalty, part of a new series of reissues of his work in Penguin Modern Classics

Harry Caldecote is the most charming man you'll ever meet, a convivial academic who devotes his life to others. He is on call when his alcoholic niece falls into strange hands, when his brother threatens to emulate Wordsworth, when his son's lesbian lodger is beaten up by her girlfriend. He endures misplaced seductions, swindles and aggressive dogs just to keep the peace at the King's pub in Shepherd's Hill. But when the Adams' Institute of Cultural and Commercial History in America offers him the opportunity to do 'whatever he wanted to do' in a picturesque lakeside town, he faces a choice between freedom or responsibility - and whether to take charge of his own life.

  • Published: 25 July 2012
  • ISBN: 9780141961880
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

About the author

Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis has been described as 'the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century'. Born in 1922, he wrote over twenty novels, including Lucky Jim (1954), winner of the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction, The Old Devils (1986), which won the Booker Prize, and The Biographer's Moustache (1995). He also published several collections of short stories, poetry and non-fiction. Amis was awarded a CBE in 1981 and received a knighthood in 1990. He died in 1995.

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Praise for The Folks That Live On The Hill

Like Waugh he is a consummate writer of sentences, a mordant practitioner of perfected English prose ... Amis's gift for outrage is as alert as ever

Independent

Sometimes sharply funny, sometimes bluntly genial, altogether the most successful book he has written for years

Sunday Times