Through Jonathan Coe's expert retelling of Swift's famous satire about human hubris and desires, young readers are swept along as Gulliver finds himself in Lilliput and Brobdignag, on the flying island of Laputa, and in the land of the Houyhnhnms, talking horses who think precious little of human Yahoos.
'Big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving' - Guardian Telling the stories of the wealthy Winshaw family, WHAT A CARVE UP! is a riveting social satire on the chattering and all-powerful upper classes.
B.S. Johnson was a well-known novelist whose innovations included a novel published in a box so its unbound chapters could be read in any order. But in 1973, depression caused him to take his own life at the age of 40. This biography reveals his fierce commitment to truth and honesty.
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. Set against the backdrop of the decade's class struggles, tragic and riotous by turns, packed with thwarted romance and furtive sex, The Rotters' Club is for anyone who ever experienced adolescence the hard way.
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 ...
Beginning eight years ago on the outskirts of Birmingham, where car factories have been replaced by Poundland, and London, where frenzied riots give way to Olympic fever, Middle England follows a brilliantly vivid cast of characters through a time of immense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. There are newlyweds Ian and Sophie, who disagree about the future of the country and, possibly, the future of their relationship; Doug, the political commentator who writes impassioned columns about austerity from his Chelsea townhouse, and his radical teenage daughter who will stop at nothing in her quest for social justice; Benjamin Trotter, who embarks on an apparently doomed new career in middle age, and his father Colin, whose last wish is to vote in the European referendum. And within all these lives is the story of modern England- a story of nostalgia and delusion; of bewilderment and barely-suppressed rage. Following in the footsteps of The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle, Jonathan Coe's new novel is the novel for our strange new times.
A young woman named Calista meets the famed Hollywood director Billy Wilder in the sweltering summer of 1976. She knows nothing about him or his work, but this chance encounter will change her life for good. But while Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself - struggling to raise the money for his next feature film - is living with the realisation that his star may be on the wane. In his new novel that is, by turns, funny, tender and profoundly truthful, Jonathan Coe turns his gaze to the nature of time, fame, family and nostalgia. When the world is catapulting towards change, do you hold on for dear life or decide it's time to let go?
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 seventy-five years of social change, from the Coronation and the World Cup final, to royal weddings, 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. Will these changing times bring Mary's family - and their country - closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before?
Set against the backdrop of the Millenium 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.
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. It's about living in a city where bankers need cinemas in their basements and others need food banks down the street. It is Jonathan Coe doing what he does best - showing us how we live now. "Coe is among the handful of novelists who can tell us something about the temper of our times"
