Recommendations
Books Like Lucky Jim
What to read after Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954) is the funniest English novel of the postwar period — Jim Dixon's disastrous year at a provincial university, his secret contempt for everyone around him, and his accidental escape to something better. If you were drawn to its comic energy and its portrait of a man who refuses to pretend to believe in what he's supposed to believe in, these novels will find you in the same territory.
- 1Buy
A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
Ignatius J. Reilly in 1960s New Orleans — the American equivalent of Lucky Jim's comic grandiosity; where Jim Dixon secretly despises the genteel world of the English university while pretending to belong to it, Ignatius openly despises the modern world and makes no effort to pretend otherwise; both novels are about a man of furious intelligence trapped in a world that baffles and disgusts him
- 2Buy
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Charles Ryder's memories of the Flyte family and his years at Oxford — Amis's Lucky Jim is explicitly a reaction against the Brideshead world: the aesthetic Catholicism, the romantic nostalgia for the English aristocracy; reading both novels together shows the comic and the elegiac approaches to the English class system in postwar fiction
- 3Buy
The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
A group of Classics students at a small Vermont college who commit a murder — the dark academic novel that uses the same enclosed university world as Lucky Jim but to completely different effect; where Amis's novel is a comic escape from academic pretension, Tartt's is a thriller about what happens when a small group takes its intellectual pretensions seriously
- 4Buy
Starter for Ten
by David Nicholls
Brian Jackson, a working-class student at Bristol University in the 1980s preparing for University Challenge — the most directly Lucky Jim-adjacent contemporary British novel; the same provincial university world, the same class anxiety, the same comic disasters, updated to Thatcher's Britain; by the author of One Day
- 5Buy
The Inimitable Jeeves
by P.G. Wodehouse
Bertie Wooster and Jeeves navigating the English class system — Amis acknowledged Wodehouse as one of Lucky Jim's primary influences; where Wodehouse gives you the pre-war English gentleman in a state of cheerful idiocy, Amis gives you the postwar version of the same social world from the inside of someone who is not supposed to be in it
- 6Buy
The History Man
by Malcolm Bradbury
Howard Kirk, a radical sociologist at a fictional British university in 1972 — the campus novel that follows Lucky Jim most directly; where Jim Dixon is a conservative traditionalist disguised as a lecturer, Howard Kirk is a radical theorist who exploits the permissive new university culture; both novels are savage about academic pretension, from different political angles
- 7Buy
Porterhouse Blue
by Tom Sharpe
A fictional Cambridge college in crisis — farcical, aggressive, and deeply funny; Sharpe is the natural heir to Amis's comic tradition in British fiction; Porterhouse Blue is the most consistently funny British campus novel after Lucky Jim and belongs in the same category
- 8Buy
Money: A Suicide Note
by Martin Amis
John Self, a television commercials director in a world of money, sex, and junk food — Kingsley Amis's son Martin is the most direct inheritor of Lucky Jim's comic aggression; Money is the 1984 version of what Lucky Jim does: a first-person narrator of appalling self-awareness trapped in a world of universal vulgarity, trying to figure out how to escape
More Lucky Jim Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.