Showing results by author "Jonathan Coe" in All Categories

Brought to you by Penguin. Costa Best Novel Award 2019 Winner. It was tempting to think, at times like this, that some bizarre hysteria had gripped the British people. Beginning eight years ago on the outskirts of Birmingham, where car factories have been replaced by Poundland, and London, where...

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.

Brought to you by Penguin. Post-university life doesn’t suit Phyl. Time passes slowly, living with her parents and working a zero-hours contract at Heathrow Airport, while her budding plans of becoming a writer are going nowhere. That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He’s been...

Brought to you by Penguin. 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...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe, read by Richard Goulding. 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...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim written by Jonathan Coe, read by John Heffernan. 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...

Brought to you by Penguin. From the prize-winning, bestselling author of Middle England. In the heady summer of 1977, a naïve 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...

Brought to you by Penguin. Expo 58 - Good-looking girls and sinister spies: a naive Englishman at loose in Europe in Jonathan Coe's brilliant comic novel London, 1958: unassuming civil servant Thomas Foley is plucked from his desk at the Central Office of Information and sent on a six-month trip...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe, read by Nicholas Burns. On Millennium night, with Blair presiding over a superficially cool, sexed-up new version of the country, Benjamin Trotter finds himself watching the celebrations on his parents' TV. Watching, in...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of A Touch of Love by Jonathan Coe, read by Peter Caulfield. Robin, a postgrad student in Coventry, has spent four and a half years not writing his thesis. He and his academic colleagues, united by pallor, social ineptitude and sexual inexperience, once...

Brought to you by Penguin. 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...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Number 11 by Jonathan Coe, read by Rory Kinnear and Jessica Hynes . 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...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Rain Before it Falls written by Jonathan Coe, read by Jenny Agutter. 'What I want you to have, Imogen, above all, is a sense of your own history; a sense of where you come from, and of the forces that made you.' Rosamund lies dying in her remote...

Gulliver is a travel-hungry and adventurous ship's doctor who has the odd misfortune of being ship-wrecked four times in as many voyages. Gulliver finds himself a giant among tiny humans in Lilliput; a tiny human among giants in Brobdignag; on the flying island of Laputa, with its most impractical intellectuals; and finally in the land of the Houyhnhnms, talking horses who think precious little of human ‘Yahoos’.

The downloadable audiobook edition of Jonathan's Coe satirical masterpiece, What a Carve Up! A brilliant noir farce, a dystopian vision of Britain, a family history and the story of an obsession. Michael is a lonely, rather pathetic writer, obsessed by the film, 'What A Carve Up!' in which a mad...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Accidental Woman by Jonathan Coe, read by Sophie Ward. For Maria, nothing is certain. Her life is a chain of accidents. Friendship passes her by, and she's unimpressed by the devoted Ronny and his endless proposals of marriage. Maria lives in a world...

'Probably the best English novelist of his generation' Nick Hornby 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...

Jonathan Coe's previous novel, The Rotters' Club, was a novel of innocence: a nostalgic, humorous evocation of adolescent life in 1970s Britain. The Closed Circle is its mirror image: a novel of experience. On Millennium night, with Blair presiding over a superficially cool, sexed-up new version...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Dwarves of Death by Jonathan Coe, read by Daniel Weyman. Music, murder ... and Madeleine William has a lot on his mind. Firstly there's The Alaska Factory, the band he plays in. They're no good and they make his songs sound about as groovy as an...

Pentatonic, written and read by Jonathan Coe, is a daring and original story about family and memory, originally inspired by the accompanying music from Danny Manners. When a family celebrates the prize-giving day at their daughter's secondary school, thoughts turn to their own childhoods. The...