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.

“Funny, moving, acute, The Lit Pack brilliantly invents its own hybrid genre: a memoir about love, an autofiction about the anxieties of ambition and class, and a new kind of literary history. I couldn’t stop reading it.” – James Wood

“The Lit Pack is a whole bookcase squashed into just a few hundred pages: the memoir of a failed novelist that is tangled up with a group biography of the writers who helped to define a generation… It’s as gripping as a thriller and as slippery as a box of eels” – Robert Douglas-Fairhurst