The Alteration is a 1976 alternative history novel by Kingsley Amis, set in a parallel universe in which the Reformation did not take place. Life and career. Kingsley Amis’s most popular book is Lucky Jim. Kingsley Amis has 127 books on Goodreads with 102128 ratings. His son Martin also became a well-known novelist. Kingsley Amis, novelist, poet, critic, and teacher who created in his first novel, Lucky Jim, a comic figure that became a household word in Great Britain in the 1950s. Learn more about Amis’s life and career in this article. The Amis grandparents were wealthy. There are some atheists who do not so much disbelieve in God as hate him, and Kingsley Amis seems to me the best writer among them. Creative origins. Kingsley Amis was born on 16 April 1922 in Clapham, south London, the only child of William Robert Amis (1889–1963), a clerk for the mustard manufacturer Colman's in the City of London, and his wife Rosa Annie (née Lucas). It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1977. Andrew Brown's blog Religion. Amis vs God.