The year is 1970, and it’s a long, hot summer. In a castle on a mountainside in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on a sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing—twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel—is struggling to twist feminism and women’s ascendency toward his own ends.As revolutions go, this one might have been nonviolent, but it wasn’t bloodless—and now, in the twenty-first century, the events of 1970 and their repercussions are finally catching up with Keith Nearing.The Pregnant Widow is a comedy of manners and a nightmare, with all the confused vigor of youth and the bittersweet and sometimes simply bitter—wisdom of age and experience. Brilliant, haunting, and gloriously risqué, it is Martin Amis at his fearless best.