The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis

Category: General Fiction, Humor
Language: English
Keywords: British Literature NYRB Classics

Written by Kingsley Amis
Read by David Sibley
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

Winner of the 1986 Booker Prize.

A pub gathering of elderly married couples devolves into mischief in this “sharp and funny” British comedy about marriage, aging, and friendship.

Age has done everything except mellow the characters in Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which turns its humane and ironic gaze on a group of Welsh married couples who have been spending their golden years—when “all of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast”—nattering, complaining, reminiscing, and, above all, drinking. This more or less orderly social world is thrown off-kilter, however, when two old friends unexpectedly return from England: Alun Weaver, now a celebrated man of Welsh letters, and his entrancing wife, Rhiannon. Long-dormant rivalries and romances are rudely awakened, as life at the Bible and Crown, the local pub, is changed irrevocably.

Considered by Martin Amis to be Kingsley Amis’s greatest achievement—a book that “stands comparison with any English novel of the [twentieth] century”—The Old Devils confronts the attrition of aging with rare candor, sympathy, and moral intelligence.

Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
Release date: 06-27-23