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.
Publisher: Penguin Books LtdISBN: 9780241517406Number of pages: 368Weight: 255 gDimensions: 198 x 129 x 22 mm
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'With his third novel in four years,Coe is on a roll; he tracks the fortunes of a family through snapshots of communal experiences,from the Queen's coronation through the 1966 World Cup to pandemic lockdown,in a moving,compassionate portrait of individual and national change.'- The Guardian,Best Fiction of 2022
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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