Martin Amis used to be known as the author of coruscatingly clever satirical novels. Lately, he's been better known for his controversial views on Islam. And his one novel in the last 12 years was widely reviled. Literary observers couldn’t help but ask: was one of Britain’s most celebrated and admired practitioners of the form finally spent as a novelist? The Pregnant Widow answers that question with a resounding no.

Here, Amis returns to the satirical, semi-autobiographical territory he covers so well. The Pregnant Widow looks at the effects of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s on men, women and relations between the sexes. In particular, he looks at the effects on a small group of young people holidaying together in an Italian castle in the summer of 1970, at a time when ‘girls acting like boys was in the air’.

Twenty-year-old Keith Nearing, a clever English graduate with ambitions to be a critic, is spending the summer with ‘two blondes’, Lily and Scheherezade, and an extended cast of seemingly peripheral characters. Lily, his on–off girlfriend, is a Possible; Scheherezade, her best friend, has recently blossomed from a serious young activist into a glorious Vision. Nightly, Lily glumly predicts that Keith – who, contrary to the spirit of the times, is helplessly prone to falling in love – will fall for Scheherezade. Meanwhile, Scheherezade becomes increasingly desperate to ‘try out’ her newly awakened sexuality.

Itinerant guests at the house include four-foot tall local Adonis, Adriano, Scheherezade’s ardent suitor; seemingly prim Gloria, whose ‘arse like a prize tomato’ is almost as spectacular as Scheherezade’s breasts; Keith’s acerbic homosexual friend Whittaker, his sculpted Arab boyfriend, Amen, and Amen’s veiled sister. And Keith’s visit is punctuated by missives from London, updating him on his dangerously promiscuous sister, Violet, ‘who acts like a very bad boy’.

Keith suffers a ‘sexual trauma’ during this fateful summer that colours the rest of his life – but all of the characters are marked to some extent by this new social order. And Keith’s transformation from a man apt to fall in love into a man in tune with his age, ‘when sex divorced itself from feeling’ is as much of a disaster as anything else that happens to him. Keith reflects that: ‘the English novel, at least in its first two or three centuries, asked only one question.

Will she fall? Will she fall, this woman?’ The Pregnant Widow, in the spirit of the revolution it mines for material, asks one core question: not ‘will he fall?’, but ‘how will he fall?’

There’s plenty to enjoy in The Pregnant Widow: cleverly drawn characters, lashings of social satire, unexpected plot twists, intriguing ruminations on politics, very funny riffings on literature (including a long discussion of why ‘Elizabeth Bennett is a cock’) and much to think about when the final page has been turned. And yes, Amis the novelist is well and truly back.