Books by Jonathan Coe
The Rotters' Club
by Jonathan Coe
A group of school friends come of age in 1970s Birmingham, England. A hilarious and nostalgic coming-of-age tale, drawn heavily from Coe's own experiences, and which features, famously, an almost 14,000-word sentence. Expect dry British humour and postmodern elements.
“I think it’s one of the most brilliant relatively recent novels about money and wealth. it’s about a young novelist who gets a commission to write a history of the Winshaw family. The family has its hooks into almost every aspect of British life in the 1980s: there’s an art dealer, a very cruel factory farmer, a politician, an arms dealer, a poisonous newspaper columnist. It’s very complicated, because the timelines are fractured, and there are coincidences everywhere. It’s written in quite a postmodern way. But its central depiction of a family on the make, all connected to and helping each other up the greasy pole is very relevant to life in Britain today. They are very Johnsonian, the Winshaws.” Read more...
Novels of the Rich and Wealthy
Andrew Hunter Murray, Comedians & Humorist
Bournville
by Jonathan Coe
“Over several decades Jonathan Coe has emerged as one of the great state-of-the-nation novelists of our time. He writes about ordinary people living through the transformative changes of postwar Britain. Bournville is another episode in a cycle of books. It shares some of the same characters with books he’s written before. It very cleverly takes particular moments from VE Day in 1945—and the sense of exhilaration at the end of the war—right up to the COVID lockdown of 2020.
Through these snapshots, Bournville tells the story of one woman and her family and the culture as a whole. He’s wonderfully precise and vivid about the texture of everyday life. At the same time, there is this great overarching sense of historical change—not only how it’s appreciated in the abstract, in terms of political events, but how it feels on the inside, how social change imprints itself in the emotional and cultural life of ordinary people. He accomplishes that in very subtle but brilliant forms.”
Interviews where books by Jonathan Coe were recommended
Novels of the Rich and Wealthy, recommended by Andrew Hunter Murray
Many of us fantasize about suddenly coming into a great fortune, but literature has often explored the dissatisfaction and moral corruption of the very wealthy. Here, the novelist and broadcaster Andrew Hunter Murray selects five brilliant novels about rich people and reflects on why you probably don’t want to be a billionaire.
The Funniest Books of the 21st Century
This year, to mark its 25th anniversary, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction set out to find the funniest book of the last twenty-five years. We asked comedian Tatty Macleod, one of the judges, about the process of sifting through 25 previous winners to find the funniest book of the 21st century.
