Jake's Thing - Tapa blanda

"Amis amazes at every turn" (Mail on Sunday)

"A great storyteller, although he was much more than a storyteller" (Keith Waterhouse)

"He was a genuine comic writer, probably the best after P. G. Wodehouse-He had a lasting influence and was a very good novelist" (John Mortimer)

"In these explicit days, Mr Amis is the laureate of the unsayable, the literary it man" (Sunday Telegraph)

Jake Richardson, an Oxford don nearing sixty with a lifetime's lechery behind him, is in pursuit of his lost libido and heads off to the consulting room of a miniature sex therapist. Not one to disobey a doctor's orders, he runs the full humiliating gamut of sex labs and trendy 'workshops', where more than souls are bared. He decks himself with cunning gadgetry, dreams up a weekly fantasy, pets diligently with his overweight wife and browses listlessly through porn magazines behind locked doors. Is sex really worth it? As liberationists abuse him, a campus hostess bores him into bed - and even his own wife starts acting oddly - Jake seriously begins to wonder.