Jonathan Coe

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Michael Rosen |Katherine Rundell |Olivia Laing |Jonathan Coe |Ali Smith |Rutger Bregman | +6 more

Zadie SmithFor me summer reading is about immersion. Three novels fully absorbed me recently. Flesh by David Szalay is a very smart and stylish novel about the 1%, filtered through the life of a Hungarian bodyguard/driver in their midst. Cécé by Emmelie Prophète (out 23 September) vividly depicts the slums of contemporary Haiti via a very online young sex worker who lives her best life on Facebook.

2 months ago | bostonherald.com | Malcolm Forbes |Jonathan Coe

For almost four decades now, Jonathan Coe has employed wit, insight and scalpel-sharp satire to deliver compulsive, incisive novels that chronicle British lives and explore facets of Britishness. Coe’s 1994 breakthrough, “The Winshaw Legacy,” laid bare the rapacious appetites and other grotesque qualities of “the meanest, greediest, cruelest” upper-class family. “Middle England” (2018) depicted a disunited kingdom after the Brexit vote.

Jan 24, 2025 | publishersweekly.com | Jonathan Coe |Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |Stuart Nadler |Boris Fishman

Jonathan Coe. Europa, $18 trade paper (368p) ISBN 979-8-88966-091-0Coe’s delectable whodunit (after Bournville) combines shadowy right-wing politics and literary intrigue. It’s 2022 and British magazine editor Christopher Swann is on the verge of exposing a right-wing think tank’s plot against the National Health Service. After conservative prime minister Liz Truss is sworn in, the think tank holds a conference in an English country house, which Swann attends.

Jan 3, 2025 | theguardian.com | Jonathan Coe

‘My imagination,” David Lodge once wrote, “seems drawn to binary structures which bring contrasting milieux, cultures and characters into contact and conflict”. He was talking specifically about the genesis of his “breakthrough novel”, Changing Places, which found so much comedy – broad and subtle, oblique and laugh-out-loud – in the contrast between British and American ways of academic life.

Nov 7, 2024 | waterstones.com | Mark Skinner |Jonathan Coe |Vesna Goldsworthy |Cecile Pin

Posted on 7th November 2024 by Mark Skinner The Proof of My Innocence – the new, bitingly funny novel from the author of The Rotter's Club and Middle England – blends murder mystery, coming-of-age story, dark academia and sublimely sharp political commentary to unputdownable effect. In this exclusive piece, Jonathan Coe shares his top five political novels of all time. Iron Curtain by Vesna Goldsworthy ‘Political’ novels come in all shapes, sizes and forms. We could be talking sexual...