The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Martin Amis's The Information. We hope they will enrich your understanding of this brilliant new novel by a writer who has provided one of England's most consistently provocative and commanding voices for over twenty years.

Richard Tull, at forty, considers himself a failure: his novels, never very successful, have become so abstract as to be unpublishable, and he ekes out a living writing book reviews. With growing bitterness and rage he contemplates the very different trajectory of his oldest friend, Gwyn Barry, a mediocre writer who, on the strength of a single bland, New Age bestseller, has attained the status of pop icon. Richard becomes increasingly dissociated from his wife, his children, and his own soul as he broods obsessively on ways to get even with his "friend." A hostile profile in a major newspaper? A cooked-up charge of plagiarism? Richard even tries to break up Gwyn's marriage by seducing his wife. Finally he decides that Gwyn is so cushioned by success and adulation that he is impervious to mere criticism; only bodily harm will do the trick, and so Scozzy, a professional criminal who embodies the terrifying forces of violence and chaos with which Richard has never before been confronted, enters the lives of the Tull family, and events move beyond Richard's control. Told in a highly inventive and charged language,The Information is a blackly comic novel about art, family, and self-delusion.