First edition. Octavo. Original publisher’s black cloth, lettered gilt to the spine, in the original dustwrapper. Library stamp of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s step-mother, to title page.
 
A very good copy, slightly cocked from reading, in a very good dustwrapper.
 
First edition of Amis’s much-heralded memoir and an exceptional association copy, from the library of Elizabeth Jane, to whom much of the early part of the book is addressed.
 
Amis’s inventive memoir has come to be seen as one of his greatest works, with reminiscence interspered with letters written in his adolescene and early adulthood to his father Kingsley Amis, and step-mother Elizabeth Jane Howard, to who Amis père was married from 1965-1983.
 
PROVENANCE: Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014), novelist, and the author’s step-mother, with her library stamp to the title page.