{"id":612602,"date":"2026-09-26T17:36:27","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T17:36:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/612602\/"},"modified":"2026-09-26T17:36:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T17:36:27","slug":"yellow-dog-by-martin-amis-review-bill-nighy-has-a-ball-martin-amis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/612602\/","title":{"rendered":"Yellow Dog by Martin Amis review \u2013 Bill Nighy has a ball | Martin Amis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\">In the 2003 novel Yellow Dog, Xan Meo is set upon by two men in a pub who cosh him over the head: \u201cLike the statue of a fallen tyrant, he crashed sideways into the damp paving, and lay still.\u201d Meo is a writer and actor whose late father was a dangerous gangster; the attack is in revenge for Meo naming an old associate of his father in print. Meo survives, though the injury leaves him with an altered personality. Where he was previously a conscientious husband and father, now he is a chip off the old block.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\">While Meo languishes in hospital, King Henry IX \u2013 who is struggling to conceal his boredom with the job \u2013 is informed that images of his 15-year-old daughter in the bath are in circulation. And Clint Smoker, star reporter and gossip peddler at the tabloid newspaper the Morning Lark, gets an unexpected tipoff.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\">Yellow Dog is the Booker-nominated satirical novel by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/martinamis\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" data-component=\"auto-linked-tag\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Martin Amis<\/a> which, through a trio of interconnected comic narratives, explores the baser instincts of men. It is one of several Amis titles being released on audio this year; others include Money, London Fields, Night Train and The Rachel Papers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\">Bill Nighy is The Yellow Dog\u2019s narrator, and he has a ball voicing Amis\u2019s larger-than-life protagonists. Along with Meo, Smoker and King Henry, a suitably eccentric supporting cast includes Russia, Xan\u2019s long-suffering wife; gruff bodyguard Mal Bale; pornography tycoon Cora Susan; and mercurial football striker and tabloid darling Ainsley Car. Though some of these characters veer into caricature on the page, Nighy succeeds not only in making them believable but great fun to be around.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\"> Available via Vintage Digital, 11hr 54min<\/p>\n<p>Further listening<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\">Love Lane<br \/>Patrick Gale, Tinder, 7hr 53min<br \/>Gale\u2019s follow-up to his 2015 novel A Place in Winter finds his elderly protagonist Harry Cane sailing home to a radically different England and trying to reconnect with the family he abandoned. Read by the author.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\">Honoured<br \/>Naz Shah, Weidenfeld &amp; Nicolson, 7hr 13min<br \/>The Labour MP for Bradford West narrates her memoir recalling her traumatic childhood and teen years \u2013 she witnessed domestic violence against her mother and was forced into marriage at the age of 15 \u2013 and her eventual path into politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the 2003 novel Yellow Dog, Xan Meo is set upon by two men in a pub who&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":612603,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-612602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/612603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}