Jonathan Coe

'Big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving' - Guardian Telling the stories of the wealthy Winshaw family, WHAT A CARVE UP! is a riveting social satire on the chattering and all-powerful upper classes.

What a Carve Up!

Set in the Midlands and London over the last eight years, Jonathan Coe follows a brilliantly vivid cast of characters through a time of immense change and disruption in Britain. There are the early married years of Sophie and Ian who disagree about the future of Britain and, possibly, the future of their relationship; Sophie's grandfather whose final act is to send a postal vote for the European referendum; Doug, the political commentator, whose young daughter despairs of his lack of political nous and Doug's Remaining Tory politician partner who is savaged by the crazed trolls of Twitter. And within all these lives is the story of England itself: a story of nostalgia and irony; of friendship and rage, humour and intense bewilderment. As acutely alert to the absurdity of the political classes as he is compassionate about those who have been left behind, this is a novel Jonathan Coe was born to write.

Middle England

**The dazzling new novel from the prize-winning, bestselling author of Middle England** In the heady summer of 1977, a naïve young woman called Calista sets out from Athens to venture into the wider world. On a Greek island that has been turned into a film set, she finds herself working for the famed Hollywood director Billy Wilder, about whom she knows almost nothing. But the time she spends in this glamorous, unfamiliar new life will change her for good. While Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself is living with the realisation that his star may be on the wane. Rebuffed by Hollywood, he has financed his new film with German money, and when Calista follows him to Munich for the shooting of further scenes, she finds herself joining him on a journey of memory into the dark heart of his family history. In a novel that is at once a tender coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of one of cinema's most intriguing figures, Jonathan Coe turns his gaze on the nature of time and fame, of family and the treacherous lure of nostalgia. When the world is catapulting towards change, do you hold on for dear life or decide it's time to let go? _______________________________________________________ Praise for Jonathan Coe 'Coe is a writer of uncommon decency' Observer 'Brilliantly funny' Economist 'Superb' Times 'Very, very funny' Stylist

Mr Wilder and Me

The once adolescent characters of The Rotters' Club return, this time to confront the turmoil of middle age as they deal with dramatic changes in their lives, scandal, personal turmoil, and dark memories of the past. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

The Closed Circle

La casa del sonno

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Middle England comes a profoundly moving, brutally funny and brilliantly true portrait of Britain told through four generations of one family In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For eleven-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it's the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades. Mary will go on to live through the Coronation and the World Cup final, royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. She'll have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, as modern life and the city crowd in on their peaceful enclave. As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the World Wide Web, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary's family - and their country - closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before? Bournville is a rich and poignant new novel from the bestselling, Costa award-winning author of Middle England. It is the story of a woman, of a nation's love affair with chocolate, of Britain itself. 'A wickedly funny, clever, but also tender and lyrical novel about Britain and Britishness and what we have become' Rachel Joyce 'It is miraculous how, in his new novel, Coe has created a social history of postwar Britain as we are still living it. Bournville is a beautiful, and often very funny, tribute to an underexamined place and also a truly moving story of how a country discovered tolerance' Sathnam Sanghera, bestselling author of Empireland

From the bestselling author of Middle England

Bournville

This is a novel about the hundreds of tiny connections between the public and private worlds and how they affect us all. It's about the legacy of war and the end of innocence. It's about how comedy and politics are battling it out and comedy might have won. It's about how 140 characters can make fools of us all. It's about living in a city where bankers need cinemas in their basements and others need food banks down the street. It is Jonathan Coe doing what he does best ­ - showing us how we live now. 'Probably the best English novelist of his generation.' Nick Hornby 'Thank goodness for Jonathan Coe.' Scotland on Sunday 'Coe is among the handful of novelists who can tell us something about the temper of our times.' Observer

Number 11

Maxwell Sim seems to have hit rock bottom. Estranged from his father, newly divorced, unable to communicate with his only daughter, he realizes that while he may have seventy-four friends on Facebook, there is nobody in the world with whom he can actually share his problems. Then a business proposition comes his way - a strange exercise in corporate PR that will require him to spend a week driving from London to a remote retail outlet on the Shetland Isles. Setting out with an open mind, good intentions and a friendly voice on his SatNav for company, Maxwell finds that this journey soon takes a more serious turn, and carries him not only to the furthest point of the United Kingdom, but into some of the deepest and darkest corners of his own past. In his sparkling and hugely enjoyable new book Jonathan Coe reinvents the picaresque novel for our time. 'Coe's book is as funny and as well written as you'd expect: even the banality of Maxwell's mind is rendered deadpan, with wonderful lightness. It is archly and artfully structured, too; though I can't, without spoiling a plot that delivers revelations and switch backs in careful sequence, go deeply into how.' Sam Leith, Prospect Magazine 'An engaging novel.' Lianne Kolirin, The Express 'Coe has always been a virtuoso of voice. He is the master of the kind of distinctively English comedy that has its roots in Fielding and Sterne.' Jonathan Derbyshire, New Statesman 'Funny and touching.' Grazia 'A highly engaging portrait of both a man and a society that have lost their way.' Michael Arditti, Daily Mail 'The plot is everything Max is not: clever, engaging, and spring-loaded with mysteries and surprises.' Caroline McGinn, Time Out London 'exceptionally moving...... [managing] to tell us something about loneliness, failure and the inability to cope that we haven't quite read before.' Alex Clark, The Guardian 'The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is 'cunningly plotted, extremely well-written and very, very funny.' Mark Sanderson, The Telegraph 'The Terrible Privacy is more intimate than Coe's previous novels. Coe may blackly satirise an atomised 21st-century Britain pockmarked by Travelodges and in thrall to the empty caress of instant messaging but this geographical and cultural hinterland is really a physical correlative for Sim's existential crisis.' Claire Allfree, Metro 'The Terrible Privacy is a brilliant achievement.' WORD Magazine 'The novel is is an amusing confrontation with its up-to-the-minute themes and a handsome success.' The Times - Lead Fiction review, Leo Robson 'In one pivotal scene, Maxwell is reunited with his daughter in a restaurant and both spend the encounter texting and BlackBerrying. Which is one thing you are guaranteed not to do while reading this deliriously funny book.' TATLER - Sebastian Shakespare 'Jonathan Coe's engaging tale about a solitary man says much about modern society.' OBSERVER, Jeremy Paxman

The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

Expo 58 - Good-looking girls and sinister spies: a naive Englishman at loose in Europe in Jonathan Coe's brilliant comic novelLondon, 1958: unassuming civil servant Thomas Foley is plucked from his desk at the Central Office of Information and sent on a six-month trip to Brussels. His task: to keep an eye on The Brittania, a brand new pub which will form the heart of the British presence at Expo 58 - the biggest World's Fair of the century, and the first to be held since the Second World War.As soon as he arrives at the site, Thomas feels that he has escaped a repressed, backward-looking country and fallen headlong into an era of modernity and optimism. He is equally bewitched by the surreal, gigantic Atomium, which stands at the heart of this brave new world, and by Anneke, the lovely Flemish hostess who meets him off his plane. But Thomas's new-found sense of freedom comes at a price: the Cold War is at its height, the mischievous Belgians have placed the American and Soviet pavilions right next to each other - and why is he being followed everywhere by two mysterious emissaries of the British Secret Service? Expo 58 may represent a glittering future, both for Europe and for Thomas himself, but he will soon be forced to decide where his public and private loyaties really lie.For fans of Jonathan Coe's classic comic bestsellers What a Carve Up! and The Rotters' Club, this hilarious new novel, which is set in the Mad Men period of the mid 50s, will also be loved by readers of Nick Hornby, William Boyd and Ian McEwan.'Coe has huge powers of observation and enormous literary panache' Sunday Times'No one marries formal ingenuity with inclusiveness of tone more elegantly' Time Out'Coe is among the handful of novelists who can tell us something about the temper of our times' Observer'Thank goodness for Jonathan Coe, who records what Britain has lost in the past thirty years in his elegiac fiction' Scotland on SundayJonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. Expo 58 is his tenth novel. The previous nine are all available in Penguin: The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up! (which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), The House of Sleep (which won the 1998 Prix Medicis Etranger), The Rotters' Club (winner of the Everyman Wodehouse Prize), The Closed Circle, The Rain Before It Falls and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. His biography of the novelist B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, won the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction book of the year.

Expo 58

La pioggia prima che cada

The Rain before it falls is extremely moving in its portrayal of the fleeting nature of love and happiness. But above all it's a compelling exploration of what goes to make a child : the legacies of character and history which are handed from one generation to the next.

The Rain Before it Falls

The rain before it falls

Derde deel, na De gesloten kring, van de Rotters-trilogie, vanaf de financiële crisis van 2010 tot en met de Brexit.

Klein Engeland

'What I want you to have, Imogen, above all, is a sense of your own history; a sense of where you come from, and of the forces that made you.' Rosamund lies dying in her remote Shropshire home. But before she does so, she has one last task: to put on tape not just her own story but the story of the young blind girl, her cousin's granddaughter, who turned up mysteriously at her party all those years ago. This is a story of generations, of the relationships within a family - and of what goes to make a child. Called "the best English novelist of his generation" by Nick Hornby, Jonathan Coe extends his range in this magnificent account of a Shropshire family in the last half of the twentieth century.

A comedy about the powers we acquire and relinquish when we fall asleep, and when we fall in love. It features Sarah who is narcoleptic, Terry, a disillusioned film critic for whom sleep is a memory, and for Dr Dunstan, sleep is nothing less than a global disease.

The House of Sleep

Unforgettably funny and painfully honest, Jonathan Coe's tale of Benjamin Trotter and his friends' coming of age during the 1970s is a heartfelt celebration of the joys and agonies of growing up. Set against the backdrop of the decade's class struggles, tragic and riotous by turns, packed with thwarted romance and furtive sex, The Rotters' Club is for anyone who ever experienced adolescence the hard way.

The Rotters' Club

La banda dei brocchi

Birmingham, England, c. 1973: industrial strikes, bad pop music, corrosive class warfare, adolescent angst, IRA bombings. Four friends: a class clown who stoops very low for a laugh; a confused artist enthralled by guitar rock; an earnest radical with socialist leanings; and a quiet dreamer obsessed with poetry, God, and the prettiest girl in school. As the world appears to self-destruct around them, they hold together to navigate the choppy waters of a decidedly ambiguous decade.

Jonathan Coe

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