Lionel Asbo, by Martin Amis

Amis's gothic Only Fools and Horses is like C-list life in the modern media - nasty, brutish and not short enough.

It's a heavy-handed satire on the Land of Hope and Chaviness.  Amis leaves us in no doubt how much he hates every last man union jack of us - our high-rise flats, snarling dogs, racist relations, cheating friends, ugly cities, miserable weather, rich man's football and all-consuming smartphones: "They dropped down from the car and assumed the standard modern posture - faces steeply inclined over consoles held at waist height."

There's little to like and nothing to love. Unlike those 80s gems Money, Dead Babies (what is it about those babies?), Other People and later London Fields and The Information, I had no burning desire to share it with anyone when I'd finished it. Do we really went to spend our reading time wondering if those drugged-up pit bulls really are going to savage the sentimentally smiley baby?

Lotto-winning lout and Wayne Rooney lookalike Lionel Asbo is a dark literary monster of the 21st century - a direct literary descendant of Keith Talent in London Fields. A psychopathic would-be baby murderer who calls his mansion "Wormwood Scrubs", stages a tabloid relationship with Jordan-style "Threnody" (the quotation marks are part of her name) and arranges the devastating disappearance of a 14-year schoolboy who's been sleeping with Asbo's mother. His vocabulary makes Vicky Pollard sound like Simon Callow.

So what's in store for the nephew of the tower block caricature named after Lionel Blair? Des Pepperdine is smart, gentle and loving. Just a bit too literally with his gran. She also happens to be Lionel's incongruously cryptic crossword-solving mum. Will Lionel find out? What will he do if he does? Will gran blurt something out as she degenerates into premature, crossword-clue-spewing dementia in a tatty Scottish care home?

Weird, pornographic sex is a recurring Amis theme. Remember horror toddler Marmaduke dabbling with his mother in London Fields? There's plenty more of it here. Plus an acid attack on one of Amis's traditionally underwhelming women characters. Unpleasant.

There are laughs to be found as always with Amis. Asbo's attempt to eat a lobster ends in multiple injuries and a lengthy prison spell: "And then he went back inside to confront the scarlet fortress of the crustacean."

Flashes of pure Amis are blood-spattered around. How about this for a fabulous description of a cat: "Sitting on the table, Goldie (now a ladylike three-year-old) held up a forepaw, as if to receive a courtly kiss; then she kissed it herself, and tongued it, and rolled over on to the Daily Mirror."

Paragraphs of poetic power still surprise you like a knife attack: "And here, under a powerful moon (just short of full), the restless ocean pitched and yawed, the slow churn of its facets, each of them vying to get a share of creamy light - the motion magma, the rolling mirrorball of the sea."

And who'd have thought Manchester City would ever find their magnificent way into the west London world of Amis, even if Brent Medwin is a teenage cokehead City midfielder, both of whose parents are in jail. Still, at least we are told that Lionel and "Threnody" watch West Ham lose heavily to City at Upton Park - a result which dissuades him from investing any of his millions in the aptly-named Hammers.

But I've always had a soft spot for accounts of prodigious boozing and Lionel can certainly put it away: "The champagne arrived in its steel bucket... 'Got a bigger glass? You know, like a beer mug.' Lionel grimly monitored the waiter's movements. '...Yeah, that'll do. Fill her up, boy.'"

For happily fear-free cocktails, however, I'd still rather read Kingsley Amis's excellent Everyday Drinking any day. Like some of the concoctions in that mini classic, his son's joyless novel is to be approached with caution.

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell

Not just one book; six mini masterpieces in one linked together through centuries by birthmarks, diaries and the burning human desire for justice and freedom.

It's a nineteenth century travel journal from remote Chatham Island, which is mentioned in a young English musician’s letters from 1920s Belgium, whose recipient becomes a character in a 1970s American nuclear thriller, which is read in the present-time memoirs of a small-time London publisher who finds himself imprisoned in a One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest care home.

Then there is the Blade Runner-style interview with a human clone in a dystopian future Korea of man-made fast-food restaurant slaves, 1984 thought police and Brave New World production lines. The language is Anthony Burgess; the clone namechecks Orwell and Huxley. All cars are called "fords" - another reference to Huxley's hero? - the publisher's adventure turns up in a well-loved old movie, or "disney".

Next up, a post-dystopian dystopia in which an advanced, overseas visitor turns up to map an agricultural island scarred with architectural and Buddhist relics of on old world. It's like Planet of the Apes without the apes written by goatherd Zachry in the style of Huckleberry Finn. A trick that rarely fails: go into the future to shine a light on the madness of the present.

The male musician, the thriller's heroine, the publisher, the clone and Zachry all have a comet-shaped birthmark between their shoulder blades. Are they reincarnations of the same soul travelling through time and space? Soul regeneration is a core belief of Zachry's people, who talk of a prophet called Malthus: "Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud."

But the publisher rubbishes the idea while subbing the thriller: "Far too hippie-druggy new age."

The journal is formal Victorian prose with a debt to Treasure Island; the letters are risqué, farcical and bawdy in the style of Wodehouse or Jerome K Jerome; the thriller reads like Raymond Chandler and feels like Chinatown; the memoirs - my favourite part - combine the eloquence of Evelyn Waugh and the black comedy of Kingsley Amis.

There's also a salient quote from the stroke-stricken publisher: "Come now, what's a reviewer?" I reasoned. "One who reads quickly, arrogantly, but never wisely..."

The structure takes us through the seven ages then back through them all in reverse order. The horrors of the publisher's recovery from a stroke and his efforts to escape from the care home make even the reader's rush-hour commute to work on the tube feel like a priceless freedom: "Freedom! is the fatuous cry of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is."

The publisher's recollection of Gibbons' assessment of history is a useful summary of Mitchell's brilliant book: "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."