“Tremendously capable and intimately revealing of a generation and a class.”
Daily Telegraph

“One of the ten novels of the year.”
Yorkshire Post

“Mr. Martin writes with enjoyment and eclectic good taste.”
Times Literary Supplement

Excerpts from my Introduction to Waiting:

“Waiting for the Sky to Fall, my second novel, was going to make a lot of money and propel me into the company of fulltime writers. I was summoned to the offices of A.D. Peters, the London agent who represented Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Peters sat on a sofa at the far end of a dark, fire-lit room with Jack McDougall, my editor at Chapman & Hall, the firm that had been Dickens’s first publishers. The two old men, their faces in shadow, told me they didn’t like Waiting for the Sky to Fall.”

“Into my late twenties I regularly dreamt intense dreams about writing a successful second novel, then woke paralyzed, my body a self-created straitjacket. I lay struggling between panic and trying to remember if that successful second novel was real.”

“I doggedly typed x number of sentences at night in my room in Goldhurst Terrace after my miserable bread-and-margarine job that barely paid the rent. I ate one good meal a week, on payday. A reviewer rightly guessed that perhaps I was hungry when I wrote the book. The characters in Waiting eat well. They’re middle- or upper-class postgraduates who work part time, get allowances from home, live in Chelsea or Kensington, and drink an inexhaustible supply of whisky.”