Summer 1970 - a long, hot summer. In a castle in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, and the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing - twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel - is struggling to twist feminism and the rise of women towards his own ends.

The sexual revolution may have been a velvet revolution (in at least two senses), but it wasn't bloodless - and now, in the twenty-first century, the year 1970 finally catches up with Keith Nearing.

The Pregnant Widow is a comedy of manners and a nightmare, brilliant, haunting and gloriously risque. It is the most eagerly anticipated novel of the year and Martin Amis at his fearless best.