Bournville: From the bestselling author of Middle England

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This is fine, except Coe clearly hates the monarchy - or at least thinks it's utter nonsense - so all he does is have his characters snark and gripe about it in response...except the insensitive, racist Tory piglets who just love the royals. Oink, oink. Aren't they repulsive! 🙄 This is another eminently readable Coe, full of believable characters and fizzing dialogue. And it couldn't be more timely Big Issue

Johnson’s resignation wasn’t the only major British event to occur after the novel had been delivered. “I finished the book in April or May and missed the biggest one of all,” he says of the death of the Queen. “Well, it was going to happen sooner rather than later,” he notes drily. But it is striking timing that his novel of personal loss should arrive in the aftermath of a national outpouring of grief. Oxfam books blog: Jonathan Coe and William Sutcliffe create window displays for the Oxfam Bloomsbury Bookshop". Archived from the original on 8 June 2011. In a 2001 newspaper interview, Coe described himself as an atheist. [16] Honours and awards [ edit ]Coe has the great gift of combining engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft * Guardian *

There are a few good chapters, especially those talking about Cadbury's, but I was dismayed to read in the author notes that the death of Mary Lamb in the novel was an accurate account of the passing of Coe's own mother during the Covid pandemic. Coe is clearly interested as much in the extended family as in any individuals and while some individuals in the family play a larger role than others – Mary Lamb and her youngest son Peter in particular- Coe is far more interested in family interaction than Mc Ewan. Two of the families – the Foleys who are part of our main extended family and the Trotters who play a very small role in this book – have appeared in Coe’s previous novels and, indeed, he tells us in the afterword that the Foleys may well appear again in future works.Honorary degrees: DLitt, University of Birmingham (2006); [17] DLitt, University of Wolverhampton (2006); [18] DUniv, Birmingham City University. [19]