In the heat-soaked summer of 1970, twenty-year-old Keith Nearing, a literature-obsessed student navigates the confusing new freedoms of love and lust during a holiday in an Italian castle. Dazzled by beautiful women, and torn between the romantic and cynical sides of his nature, Keith is swept along by a cultural revolution whose consequences he-and the novel-are still reckoning with decades later.

Returning to the era and the milieu of Martin Amis's youthful breakout novels, The Pregnant Widow looks back, with pain and ardor, on a moment when social upheaval seemed to offer boundless sexual freedom and delivered something more complicated. This is a novel about the unfinished business of the twentieth century-a reckoning with the promises of feminism, the delusions of youth, and the ravages of time.