Middle England

Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2019

Beginning eight years ago on the outskirts of Birmingham, where car factories have been replaced by Poundland, and London, where frenzied riots give way to Olympic fever, Middle England follows a brilliantly vivid cast of characters through a time of immense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.

Brilliantly funny . . . a compelling state of the nation novel, full of light and shade, which vividly charts modern Britain's tragicomic slide

Economist

About Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of 14 novels: The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, The Rotters’ Club, The Closed Circle, The Rain Before It Falls, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, Expo 58, Number 11, Middle England, Mr Wilder and Me and Bournville. He has won the Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Européen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, amongst many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre de l'Art et des Lettres. His work been translated into 22 languages. Jonathan Coe lives in London.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780241983683
  • Length: 432 pages
  • Dimensions: 197mm x 26mm x 128mm
  • Weight: 302g
  • Price: £9.99
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