Jonathan Coe creates vivid characters that whether you love or hate them you want to read more about them. Set in the 1970’s in the time of IRA bombings, strikes and political upheaval it is a fascinating snapshot of history and social comment as well as an immensely enjoyable read. If you haven’t read Coe before then definitely give this a go. Brilliant!
May 2010 Guest Editor John Boyne on Jonathan Coe...
A great novelist. Quirky subject matters, surprising characters, eccentric plots. The kind of writer who can leave the reader laughing out loud, a rare gift. The pair of novels The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle are modern masterpieces.
Jonathan Coe's widely acclaimed 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. A zestful comedy of personal and social upheaval, The Rotters' Club captures a fateful moment in British politics - the collapse of 'Old Labour' - and imagines its impact on the topsy-turvy world of the bemused teenager: a world in which a lost pair of swimming trunks can be just as devastating as an IRA bomb.
'One of those sweeping, ambitious yet hugely readable, moving, richly comic novels that you find all too rarely in English fiction ... a masterpiece' Daily Telegraph
Author
About Jonathan Coe
Jonathan 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.
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