Showing results by author "Jonathan Coe" in All Categories

Post-university life doesn’t suit Phyl. Time passes slowly living back home with her parents, working a zero-hour contract serving Japanese food to holidaymakers at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. As for her budding plans of becoming a writer, those are going nowhere. That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He’s been on the path to uncover a sinister think-tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that’s been scheming to push the British government in a more extreme direction. One that’s finally poised to put their plans into action.

Beginning eight years ago on the outskirts of Birmingham, where car factories have been replaced by Poundland, and London, where frenzied riots give way to Olympic fever, Middle England follows a brilliantly vivid cast of characters through a time of immense change.

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. Featuring, among other things, IRA bombs, prog rock, punk rock, bad poetry, first love, love on the side, prefects, detention, a few bottles of Blue Nun, lots of brown wallpaper, industrial strife, and divine intervention in the form of a pair of swimming trunks.

It is the 1980s, and the Winshaw family are getting richer and crueller by the year: newspaper-columnist Hilary gets thousands for telling it like it isn't; Henry's turning hospitals into car parks; Roddy's selling art in return for sex; down on the farm Dorothy's squeezing every last pound from her livestock; and Thomas is making a killing on the stock exchange. But once their hapless biographer, Michael Owen, starts investigating the family's trail of greed, corruption and immoral doings, the time is growing ripe for the Winshaws to receive their comeuppance....

La Zia Rosamond non c'è più. È morta nella sua casa nello Shropshire, dove viveva sola, dopo l'abbandono di Rebecca e la morte di Ruth, la pittrice che è stata la sua ultima compagna. A trovare il cadavere è stato il suo medico. Aveva settantatré anni ed era malata di cuore, ma non aveva mai voluto farsi fare un bypass. Quando è morta, stava ascoltando un disco – canti dell'Auvergne – e aveva un microfono in mano. Sul tavolo c'era un album di fotografie. Evidentemente, la povera Rosamond stava guardando delle foto e registrando delle cassette. Non solo.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Number 11 by Jonathan Coe, read by Rory Kinnear and Jessica Hynes. 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.

On Millennium night, with Blair presiding over a superficially cool, sexed-up new version of the country, Benjamin Trotter finds himself watching the celebrations on his parents' TV. Watching, in fact, his younger brother, Paul, now a bright young New Labour MP who has bought wholeheartedly into the Blairite dream. Neither of them can know that their lives are about to implode.

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.

Maxwell Sim seems to have hit rock bottom: separated from his wife and daughter, estranged from his father, and with no one to confide in even though he has 74 friends on Facebook. He's not even sure whether he's got a job until suddenly a strange business proposition comes his way which involves a long journey to the Shetland Isles - and a voyage into his family's past which throws up some surprising revelations. In a story for our times, Maxwell finds himself at sea in the modern world, surrounded by social networks but unable to relate properly to anyone.

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.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe, read by Jenny Agutter. 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.

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Jonathan Coe's brilliant new comic novel Expo 58, read by the actor Julian Rhind-Tutt. 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.

Sarah is a narcoleptic who has dreams so vivid she mistakes them for real events; Robert has had his life changed for ever by the misunderstandings arising from her condition; Terry, the insomniac, spends his wakeful nights fuelling his obsession with movies; and the increasingly unstable Dr Gregory Dudden sees sleep as a life-shortening disease which must be eradicated. A group of students sharing a house. They fall in and out of love, they drift apart. Yet a decade later they are drawn back together by a series of coincidences involving their obsession with sleep - and each other....

Robin, a postgrad student in Coventry, has spent four and a half years not writing his thesis. He and his academic colleagues, united by pallor, social ineptitude and sexual inexperience, once spent hours discussing their theories, but they somehow never made it into print. Now his unfinished thesis languishes in a drawer, and Robin hides in his room, increasingly frightened by a world he doesn't understand. His friends have failed him, and romance eludes him. His only outlet is his short stories, scribbled in notebooks and expressing his secret obsessions and frustrations.

For Maria, nothing is certain. Her life is a chain of accidents. Friendship passes her by, and she's unimpressed by the devoted Ronny and his endless proposals of marriage. Maria lives in a world of her own - yet not of her own making. Stumbling through university, work, marriage and motherhood, she finds it hard to see what all the fuss is about. Will she ever be able to control the direction of her life? Or will it end as it began, by accident? What does chance have in store for the accidental woman?

Trotter, Harding, Anderton e Chase: sembra il nome di un prestigioso studio legale; in realtà si tratta di un quartetto di giovani amici, che frequenta un liceo elitario di Birmingham, quel tipo di scuola che preleva giovani intelligenti dal loro background ordinario e li fa atterrare in una classe sociale diversa da quella dei loro genitori. I ragazzi sono destinati a Cambridge e Oxford, a carriere importanti, mentre i loro genitori rimangono impantanati nel loro mondo di matrimoni sciovinisti, scontri sindacali, guerre di classe e di razza, di ignoranza culturale.

Jonathan Coe's new novel is set in the 1970s against a distant backdrop of strikes, terrorist attacks, and growing racial tension. A group of young friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine and begin to put their own distinctive spin onto events in the wider world.

Set against the backdrop of the Millennium celebrations and Britain's increasingly compromised role in America's war against terrorism, The Closed Circle lifts the lid on an era in which politics and presentation, ideology and the media, have become virtually indistinguishable. Darkly comic, hugely engaging, and compulsively readable, it is the much-anticipated follow-up to Jonathan Coe's best-selling novel The Rotters' Club and reintroduces us to the characters first encountered in that book.

A Radio 4 Book Club Selection.
Newspaper columnist Hilary gets thousands for telling it like it is; Henry's turning hospitals into carparks; Roddy's selling art in return for sex; down on the farm Dorothy's squeezing every last pound from her livestock; Thomas is making a killing on the stock exchange; and Mark is selling arms to dictators.

Music, murder...and Madeleine. William has a lot on his mind. Firstly there's The Alaska Factory, the band he plays in. They're no good, and they make his songs sound about as groovy as an unpressed record. In fact they're so bad he's seriously thinking of leaving to join a group called The Unfortunates. Secondly, there's Madeleine, his high-maintenance girlfriend, whose idea of a night of passion is an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical followed by a doorstep peck on the cheek. Maybe they're not soul mates after all? Lastly, there's the bizarre murder he's just witnessed.