House of Meetings: The Story of the Founding of Australia

‘The best thing Martin Amis has done in fiction for years’ Literary Review There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances over weeks and months in the hope of spending a night with their particular enemy of the people in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. House of Meetings is about one such liaison. It is a triangular romance: two brothers fall in love with the same girl a nineteen-year-old Jewess in Moscow which is poised for pogrom in the gap between the war and the death of Stalin. Both brothers are arrested and their rivalry slowly complicates itself over a decade in the slave camp above the Arctic Circle. ‘It is difficult not to be impressed by this compact tour de force’ Observer