Shortlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2023
From the bestselling author of Middle Englandcomes a novel that tells the story of post-war Britain through four generations of one family.
In the Birmingham suburb of Bournville,site of a famous chocolate factory,a family celebrates VE Day in 1945. As the country struggles to understand the war it has just endured,six more national celebrations follow: coronations and football matches,fairy-tale weddings and royal funerals. As we travel through seventy-five years of social change,from wartime nostalgia to James Bond and coronavirus,one pressing question starts to emerge: have these milestone celebrations brought the family - and their country - closer together,or left them more adrift and divided than ever before
From one of Britain's best-loved novelists comes a story for our times,a story that is by turns unsettling and profoundly moving,brutally funny and brilliantly true.
Publisher: Penguin Books LtdISBN: 9780241517383Number of pages: 368Weight: 580 gDimensions: 238 x 164 x 31 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Coe - a writer of uncommon decency - reminds us that the way out of this mess is through moderation,through compromise,through that age-old English ability to laugh at ourselves'-Observer on Middle England
'A pertinent,entertaining study of a nation in crisis'- Financial Times on Middle England
'Middle England is a full-blooded state of the nation novel,and it brings us bang up-to-date'- Sunday Times on Middle England
Jonathan Coe
Born in 1961 in what is now the West Midlands,since his debut The Accidental Woman in 1987 Jonathan Coe has carved out a niche as one of Britain's finest exponents of satiric cultural observation. Novels such as What a Carve Up!,The Rotter's Club and Number 11 create a wincingly-accurate portrait of Britain through the seventies and beyond,complete with all its petty class warfare and the agonising blunders of adolescence and middle age.
Visit the Jonathan Coe author page
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