From the bestselling author of Middle England and Mr Wilder and Me comes a brilliant new state of the nation novel
In the Birmingham suburb of Bournville, a family celebrate VE Day in 1945. With the joy of such an occasion there also come larger national questions about the nature of the horrific war the country has just been through. Following this family through generations as they navigate seventy-five years of drastic social change, from wartime nostalgia and English exceptionalism to the World Cup and coronavirus, domestic secrets and national myths leave characters and a country adrift, bewildered and divided.
Bournville is the story of who we are - at our worst, and best. From bestselling author Jonathan Coe comes a novel of rare humour and humanity, a novel that holds up a mirror to our past and our present.
'A comedy for our times' Guardian
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The country is changing and, up and down the land, cracks are appearing - within families and between generations.
In the Midlands Benjamin Trotter is trying to help his aged father navigate a Britain that seems to have forgotten he exists, whilst in London his friend Doug doesn't understand why his teenage daughter is eternally enraged. Meanwhile, newlyweds Sophie and Ian can find nothing to agree on except the fact that their marriage is on the rocks . . .
A hilarious follow-up to The Rotters' Club and Closed Circle, Jonathan Coe captures the state of our nation once again!
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'Coe's back with a bang. Middle England is the novel about Brexit we need' Daily Telegraph
'A pertinent, entertaining study of a nation in crisis' Financial Times, Books of the Year
'Very funny. 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
Written with his signature wit, Jonathan Coe's unmissable new novel, Bournville, is available to pre-order now!
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.
'A wickedly funny, clever, but also tender and lyrical novel about Britain and Britishness and what we have become' Rachel Joyce
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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.
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'It is miraculous how, in his new novel, Coe has created a social history of postwar Britain as we are still living it. Bournville is a beautiful, and often very funny, tribute to an underexamined place and also a truly moving story of how a country discovered tolerance' Sathnam Sanghera, bestselling author of Empireland
'Epic in scope, but personal in resonance' Elizabeth Day, bestselling author of Magpie
'A hugely impressive state-of-the-nation tale' Observer
'As warming, rich and comforting as a mug of hot chocolate' The Times
'Sprinkled throughout with Coe's inimitable humour, love and white-hot anger' Evening Standard
'[Coe] has a huge talent for balancing humour with poignancy' Book of the month, Good Housekeeping
The prize-winning, bestselling author of Middle England turns his gaze to one of cinema's most intriguing figures - famed director of Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder.
***SOON TO BE A MAJOR FILM***
In the summer of 1977, naive Calista Frangopoulou sets out to venture into the world. On a Greek island that has been turned into a film set, she finds herself working for Billy Wilder, about whom she knows almost nothing.
While Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself is living with the realisation that his star may be on the wane. Rebuffed by Hollywood, he has financed his film with German money, and when Calista follows him to Munich, she finds herself joining him on a journey of memory into the dark heart of his family history.
At once a tender coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of a Hollywood icon, Mr Wilder and Me explores the nature of time and fame, of family and the treacherous lure of nostalgia . . .
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'Utterly charming, deeply poignant and ultimately uplifting' Mail on Sunday
'Sweeps beautifully from Hollywood to Greece and London' FT, Best Books of 2020
'The dialogue's sharp, the comic timing excellent' Sunday Times
Written with his signature wit, Jonathan Coe's unmissable new novel, Bournville, is available to pre-order now!
A zestful comedy of personal and social upheaval, this book 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.
Maxwell Sim seems to have hit rock bottom: separated from his wife and daughter, estranged from his father, and with no one to confide in even though he has 74 friends on Facebook. He's not even sure whether he's got a job until suddenly a strange business proposition comes his way which involves a long journey to the Shetland Isles.
Rosamund lies dying in her remote Shropshire home. But before she does so, she has one last task: to put on tape not just her own story but the story of the young blind girl, her cousin's granddaughter, who turned up mysteriously at her party all those years ago.
Inexplicably, Michael is commissioned to write the family history of the Winshaws, an upper class Yorkshire clan whose members have a finger in every establishment pie. But as a murderous maniac stalks the family, Michael realizes that his favourite film is coming true.
On Millennium night, with Blair presiding over a sexed-up new version of the country, Benjamin Trotter finds himself watching the celebrations on his parents' TV. Watching, in fact, his younger brother, Paul, now a New Labour MP who has bought wholeheartedly into the Blairite dream. Neither of them can know that their lives are about to implode.
A novel about the hundreds of tiny connections between the public and private worlds and how they affect us. It is about: the legacy of war and the end of innocence; how comedy and politics are battling it out and comedy might have won; and living in a city where bankers need cinemas in their basements and others need food banks down the street.
**The dazzling new novel from the prize-winning, bestselling author of Middle England**
'As good as anything he's written - a novel to cherish' Observer
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In the heady summer of 1977, a naive young woman called Calista sets out from Athens to venture into the wider world. On a Greek island that has been turned into a film set, she finds herself working for the famed Hollywood director Billy Wilder, about whom she knows almost nothing. But the time she spends in this glamorous, unfamiliar new life will change her for good.
While Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself is living with the realisation that his star may be on the wane. Rebuffed by Hollywood, he has financed his new film with German money, and when Calista follows him to Munich for the shooting of further scenes, she finds herself joining him on a journey of memory into the dark heart of his family history.
In a novel that is at once a tender coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of one of cinema's most intriguing figures, Jonathan Coe turns his gaze on the nature of time and fame, of family and the treacherous lure of nostalgia. When the world is catapulting towards change, do you hold on for dear life or decide it's time to let go?
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'A beautiful, bittersweet novel that is itself crying out for the silver screen treatment' Scotsman
'Effortlessly pleasurable and deceptively simple' The Times
'Utterly charming, deeply poignant and ultimately uplifting' Mail on Sunday
'A charming, bittersweet book, and a perfect reminder of art's value in stark times' Spectator
'Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life . . .'
Coming of age in 1970s' Birmingham, teenager Benjamin Trotter is about to discover the agonies and ecstasies of growing up. Whether it is first love or last rites, IRA bombs or industrial strife, prog versus punk rock, expectations of bad poetry or an unexpected life-changing experience involving lost swimming trunks, The Rotters' Club is a heartfelt and hilarious portrait of a particular time and place featuring characters recognisable the world over . . .
'Very funny, a compulsive and gripping read' The Times
'Hugely entertaining' The Observer
'A book to cherish, a book to reread, a book to buy for all your friends' Independent on Sunday
The hilarious 1980s political satire by Jonathan Coe, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time.
It is the 1980s and the Winshaw family are getting richer and crueller by the year:
Newspaper-columnist Hilary gets thousands for telling it like it isn't; Henry's turning hospitals into car parks; Roddy's selling art in return for sex; down on the farm Dorothy's squeezing every last pound from her livestock; Thomas is making a killing on the stock exchange; and Mark is selling arms to dictators.
But once their hapless biographer Michael Owen starts investigating the family's trail of greed, corruption and immoral doings, the time growing ripe for the Winshaws to receive their comeuppance. . .
This wickedly funny take on life under the Thatcher government was the winner of the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
'A sustained feat of humour, suspense and polemic, full of twists and ironies' Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times
'A riveting social satire on the chattering and all-powerful upper classes' Time Out
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.
'A wickedly funny, clever, but also tender and lyrical novel about Britain and Britishness and what we have become' Rachel Joyce
'It is miraculous how, in his new novel, Coe has created a social history of postwar Britain as we are still living it. Bournville is a beautiful, and often very funny, tribute to an underexamined place and also a truly moving story of how a country discovered tolerance' Sathnam Sanghera, bestselling author of Empireland
A heartbreaking novel of family secrets from one of the masters of modern fiction, The Rain Before it Falls is part of our Penguin Essentials series which spotlights the very best of our modern classics
Deeply moving and compelling, The Rain Before it Falls is the story of three generations of one family riven by tragedy. When Rosamund, a reluctant bearer of family secrets, dies suddenly, a mystery is left for her niece Gill to unravel. Some photograph albums and tapes point towards a blind girl named Imogen whom no one has seen in twenty years. The search for Imogen and the truth of her inheritance becomes a shocking story of mothers and daughters and of how sadness, like a musical refrain, may haunt us down the years.
'A sad, often very moving story of mothers and daughters' Guardian
'Entirely compelling...the plot will keep you rapt...reminiscent of Ian McEwan at his most effective' New Statesman
