• Ending Up
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Ending Up

Ending Up

by Kingsley Amis, introduction by Craig Brown

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Available as E-Book British & Irish Literature Fiction Humor Literature in English
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Ending Up is a grimly hilarious dance of death, full of bickering, bitching, backstabbing, drinking (of course), and idiocy of all sorts. It is a book about dying people and about a dying England, clinging to its memories of greatness as it succumbs to terminal decay.

Everyone wants a comfortable place to die, and Kingsley Amis’s characters have found it in Tuppeny-happeny Cottage, where assorted septuagenarians have come together to see one another out the door of life. There’s grotesque Adela, whose sole passion is her cheapness; her brother Brigadier Bernard Bastable, always strategizing a new retreat to the bathroom before sallying forth to play some especially nasty practical joke; Shorty, the servant, who years ago had a fling with the brigadier in the barracks and now organizes his day around a trail of hidden bottles; George Zeyer, the distinguished professor of history, bedridden and helpless to articulate his still-coherent thoughts; and Marigold, who slowly but surely is forgetting it all.

And now it is Christmas. Children and grandchildren are coming to visit their ailing elders. They don’t know what lies in store before the story ends. None of us do.

kingsley amis

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590177594
Pages: 136
Publication Date:

Praise

One of Amis’s best and darkest comedies.
—Bill Ryan, The Bulwark

His most assured success after Lucky Jim.
—William H. Pritchard, The New York Times

Only comedy of this quality can embrace such a bleak midwinter with such relish, and make the reader relish it too. The brevity, structural tightness and keen pace of Ending Up make it one of Amis's most engaging novels.
—Helen Dunmore

Ending Up is a sardonic little masterpiece which, with incredible economy and stylistic restraint, shows what old age is really like, and also—far, far better than any other writer I know—what contemporary England is like.
—Anthony Burgess

[A] savage study of old age.
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The writer who began to write in the spirit of humanist common sense in a postwar time took on rage and spleen, sometimes invested against the human condition itself, as in the very good Ending Up (1974), one of his deepest novels, and sometimes in a latter-day social ire arrayed against the entire modernity of the modern world.
—The New York Times

Mr. Amis has never done better...a very funny but also a very serious book.
—The Observer

Extraordinarily good, compulsively readable and beautifully constructed...wildly and cruelly funny.
—The Listener

With seeming effortlessness, our most spectacular all-rounder hits another boundary. Amis stretches himself to the full limit of his formidable powers.
—The Sunday Times

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