The pregnant widow
(Book)

It was the summer of 1970, the start of a new era of sexual freedom and female ascendancy. Keith, an English college student, is staying in a castle in Italy with friends. His unnervingly frank girlfriend glumly wishes she were beautiful, like the bodacious Scheherazade, who, in spite of her promising name, is dull as dust yet causes near-riots in town and pitches Keith into confusion. His hapless attempts to secretly court Scheherazade propel Amis' sly variation on classic love stories. This farcical tale of a summer of lust, in which the women have all the power but don't know what to do with it, is interwoven with glimpses of Keith in his fifties, a thrice-married, acerbic literary critic appalled by the grim alchemy of age and the crassness of the digital era.