The year is 1970, and it's a long, hot summer. In a castle on a mountainside in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on a sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, 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 women's ascendency toward his own ends.

As revolutions go, this one might have been nonviolent, but it wasn't bloodless - and now, in the twenty-first century, the events of 1970 and their repercussions are finally catching up with Keith Nearing.

The Pregnant Widow is a comedy of manners and a nightmare, with all the confused vigor of youth and the bittersweet and sometimes simply bitter - wisdom of age and experience. Brilliant, haunting, and gloriously risqué, it is Martin Amis at his fearless best.