The Lit Pack Amis, Barnes, McEwan, Their Circle and Me

They are the biggest names of the late-twentieth-century London literary scene - Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Christopher Hitchens, Clive James et al - a group of close friends that met weekly for legendary lunches and dominated literary gossip for decades. He is a struggling author setting out to write the first ever group biography of this circle - the writers who have loomed largest in his life. Framed over the course of one day, The Lit Pack follows Ben Masters as he tries to write the opening sentence of his book. But, surrounded by piles of notes, amassed from years of reading and archival research, he keeps getting distracted by the travails of parenting, self-doubt, work and social media. What emerges instead is an 'exploded biography' - a searching and sometimes fraught conversation between a millennial writer and his boomer heroes - in which the author's life becomes entangled with those of his subjects, playing on a series of ironic opposites: the metropolitan and the regional, celebrity and obscurity, sociality and reclusiveness. The Lit Pack is an unforgettable meditation on what it is to be a writer and a reader,a parent and a partner, and a heartfelt story that grapples with masculinity, generational differences, fandom and love.