An extraordinary, harrowing, endlessly surprising novel from a literary master. 

In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow. The fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst in the coveted House of Meetings will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And for the narrator, the sole survivor, the reverberations continue into the new century.

“Vivid and scarifying. . . . The book gnaws at one’s memory. Amis tries to imagine history with the intimacy and specificity that the greatest historical novelists, including Tolstoy, have always presumed to seek for it.”

The Washington Post Book World

“Arguably his most powerful book yet. . . . An unrelenting and deeply affecting performance: A bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history’s most harrowing chapters.” 

The New York Times 

“House of Meetings reminds us of Dostoyevsky. . . . A whole dome of meanings, a specific emotional world–hunger, desire, disgust, rottenness–rises around us.” 

The New Yorker

“Very fine, very moving and easily Amis’ most accessible fiction since The Information.”

The Seattle Times