TOLL FREE SERVICE: 1 (800) 231-4261
Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis audiobook

Lionel Asbo: State of England

By Martin Amis
Read by Alex Jennings

Blackstone Publishing 9780307958082
9.69 Hours • Unabridged
Format : CD (In Stock)
  • 2 Formats: CD
  • 2 Formats: MP3 CD

  • Regular Price: $45.95

    Special Price $36.76

    ISBN: 9781609989859

    Free shipping on US orders over $99

  • Regular Price: $35.95

    Special Price $28.76

    ISBN: 9780792789444

    Free shipping on US orders over $99

A savage, funny, and mysteriously poignant saga by a renowned author at the height of his powers.  Lionel Asbo, a terrifying yet weirdly loyal thug (self-named after England's notorious "Anti-Social Behavior Order"), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine. He provides him with fatherly career advice and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls, Internet porn, and all manner of more serious criminality. Des, on the other hand, desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love—and to protect a family secret that could be the death of him.  But just as he begins to lead a gentler, healthier life, his uncle—once again in a London prison—wins ┬ú140 million in the lottery and, upon his release, hires a public relations firm and begins dating a cannily ambitious topless model and "poet." Strangely, however, Lionel's true nature remains uncompromised while his problems, and therefore also Desmond's, seem only to multiply.

Learn More

Summary

Summary

A Slate Magazine Best Book of 2012: Staff Pick

An Amazon Top 100 Book of 2012

A savage, funny, and mysteriously poignant saga by a renowned author at the height of his powers. 

Lionel Asbo, a terrifying yet weirdly loyal thug (self-named after England's notorious "Anti-Social Behavior Order"), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine. He provides him with fatherly career advice and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls, Internet porn, and all manner of more serious criminality. Des, on the other hand, desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love—and to protect a family secret that could be the death of him. 

But just as he begins to lead a gentler, healthier life, his uncle—once again in a London prison—wins ┬ú140 million in the lottery and, upon his release, hires a public relations firm and begins dating a cannily ambitious topless model and "poet." Strangely, however, Lionel's true nature remains uncompromised while his problems, and therefore also Desmond's, seem only to multiply.

Editorial Reviews

Editorial Reviews

“Lionel Asbo is at heart an old-fashioned novel, earnest in its agenda...Amis is...an insistently moral writer, satire being an edifying genre with a noble cause: the improvement of society.” —New York Times Book Review
“Amis’ language is electric, his wit as sharp and precise than it has been in a decade, and Lionel Asbo has a savage, post-apocalyptic feel.” —USA Today
“Technically brilliant, dazzling in style, manic in energy, and driven by a narrative momentum impossible to resist... The novel is full of Amis’ trademark virtuoso prose and wit.” —Toronto Star
“Amis’ funniest and most satisfying novel in years—the book’s comedy [lashed] with a serious dose of menace... his warmest book—and also his most authentically chilling... Among its other surprises, Lionel Asbo delivers the most compelling plot Amis has crafted.” —Australian
“A masterpiece of social satire and cultural observation...fine, caustic, funny, angry, and outrageous.”  —Wichita Eagle
“One of Amis’ funniest novels...Amis, like his heroes Nabokov and Bellow, writes exuberant, ecstatic prose.  His ear is precisely tuned, and his sentences—in narration and dialogue—are lethal.” —New Yorker
“Amis pumps his novel full of heart and warmth, providing an unexpected reward for readers.” —People
“As combative and as vicious as ever, Amis skewers the noughties as cruelly, as inventively, and with as much screwy black comedy as his Money did the eighties.” —GQ UK
“Lionel Asbo crackles with brilliant prose and scathing satire...Amis adopts a big, playful storytelling voice in this book.  He riffs like a jazz master, in and out of vernacular, with brief gusts of description, all driven by a tight bass line of suspense.”  —Publishers Weekly
“Jennings’ portrayals of Lionel and his circle are tremendous fun.” —AudioFile
“Amis’ phenomenal vim and versatility, anchoring roots in English literature, and gift for satire power this hilariously Dickensian, nerve-racking, crafty, bull’s eye tale of a monster and a mensch…This deliciously shivery, sly, and taunting page-turner provokes a fresh assessment of the poverty of place, mind, and spirit and the wondrous blossoming of against-all-odds goodness.” —Booklist
“Little fiction is more entertaining than Martin Amis at his pithy best. His latest novel posits plenty of pith and cutting cultural criticism. It is wild. It is whacked. [It] swings between wildly funny and harshly real.”  —Cleveland Plain Dealer
“In his thirteenth novel—one of his most compulsively readable—wily, dead-on satirist and consummate artist Martin Amis is grandly acerbic, funny, and unnerving...He leads us on, shakes us up, knocks us down, brushes us off, then does it all over again...With crisp insights, rollicking storytelling, and acrobatic wit, Amis has created a...hilarious dismantlement of our cherished rags-to-riches fantasy.” —Kansas City Star
“Lionel Asbo bears a strong resemblance to the trio of novels that made Amis’ reputation. Like them, it is a satirical work...and has an elaborate plot, a series of brilliant set pieces and a matchless sense of the contemporary demotic...Lionel Asbo maybe be even better than these ambitious works of fiction, more disciplined, funnier, and more inventive....To say that it is a return to form is an understatement—it might be his finest work.” —Denver Post
“A joy—and strangely life-affirming... It certainly has much of the dazzling prose that made his earlier works so stand-out.” —Times (London)
“[Lionel Asbo] is a great big confidence trick of a novel—an attack that turns into an embrace—a book that looks at us, laughs at us, looks at us harder, closer, and laughs at us harder and still more savagely.  It is every inch the novel that we all deserve.” —Guardian (London)
“A wicked satire [and] frequently wincingly funny.  Amis’ aim at the totems and mores of common fame is as unerring, and his phrase-making as pyrotechnically dazzling, as ever…Amis also writes with real—and uncharacteristic—tenderness.” —Telegraph (London)
“A surprisingly tender story.” —Daily Mail (London)
“A ripper of a story, in the Dickens mode... Amis is the most original sentence-writer in English.” —Globe and Mail (Canada)

Reviews

Reviews

Be the first to review this product

Author

Author Bio: Martin Amis

Author Bio: Martin Amis

Martin Amis (1949-2023) was an English novelist and screenwriter. His novels Night Train and London Fields made the New York Times bestsellers list. His memoir Experience won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and two of his books were finalists for the Booker Prize. His novel Money was named by London’s The Guardian as one of the top 100 Best Novels Written in English. He was a professor of creative writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011.

Titles by Author

See All

Details

Details

Available Formats : CD, MP3 CD
Category: Fiction/Literary
Runtime: 9.69
Audience: Adult
Language: English

Get the Latest Offers + More

  • Customer Support :
  • 1 (800) 231-4261
  • 7 am to 5 pm PDT
  • [email protected]
  • Toll-Free Fax:
  • 1 (800) 882-1840
©2026 Audio Editions . All rights reserved. Privacy Terms of Use Purchase Terms Cookie Policy ©2026 Audio Editions . All rights reserved.