London Fields — Martin Amis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A blackly comic late 20th-century murder mystery set against the looming end of the millennium, in which a woman tries to orchestrate her own extinction -- from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation" (TIME).
 
“Lyrical and obscene, colloquial and rhapsodic." -- The New York Times

First published in 1989, London Fields is set ten years into a dark future, against a backdrop of environmental and social decay and the looming threat of global cataclysm. As the dreaded Y2K approaches, Nicola Six, a “black hole” of sex and self-loathing, has chosen her thirty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1999, as the date of her own murder. Whom to manipulate into killing her is the question; her choice wavers between violent lowlife Keith Talent, who is obsessed with winning a darts tournament, and a dimly romantic banker named Guy Clinch. When Samson Young -- a writer suffering from a long bout of writer's block -- stumbles upon these three, he believes he has found a story that will write itself. 

A highly unusual mystery with an unexpected twist at the end, London Fields is also a corrosively funny narrative of pyrotechnic complexity and scalding moral vision.