Bournville

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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 seventy-five years of social change, from the Coronation and the World Cup final, to royal weddings, 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. Will these changing times bring Mary's family - and their country - closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before?

With his third novel in four years, Coe is on a roll; he tracks the fortunes of a family through snapshots of communal experiences, from the Queen's coronation through the 1966 World Cup to pandemic lockdown, in a moving, compassionate portrait of individual and national change
Guardian, Best Fiction of 2022

Coe's interwoven paeans to the lives of those rooted in the very centre of the UK - The Rotter's Club and Middle England among them - blend comedy, tragedy and social commentary in enjoyably memorable fashion, and his latest, Bournville, is no exception . . . Coe's particular gift is to understand how nostalgia, regret and an apprehension of what the future will bring might make us more, not less, empathetic to the frailties of those around us
FT, Best Audiobooks of the Year

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: Viking
Published: 31/08/2023
ISBN: 9780241517406
Length: 368 pages
Dimensions: 197mm x 22mm x 128mm
Weight: 255g
Price: £9.99

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Bournville

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With his third novel in four years, Coe is on a roll; he tracks the fortunes of a family through snapshots of communal experiences, from the Queen's coronation through the 1966 World Cup to pandemic lockdown, in a moving, compassionate portrait of individual and national change

The way Coe starkly captures the paranoia and fear of the early days of the pandemic is impressive and he has written what he calls a "faithful account" of the death of his mother during lockdown. It makes an intensely affecting finale to a fine novel.

Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state of the nation novel: Jonathan Coe is one of them

Epic in scope, but personal in resonance

Very tempting

In this affecting generational saga, framed by the pandemic and structured by seven milestone broadcasts, Jonathan Coe - known for his state-of-the-nation novels - once again takes the temperature of Britain

At heart Bournville is a novel designed to make you think by making you laugh, and the seriousness of the subject matter is tempered throughout by the author's piercing eye for the more ludicrous elements of human nature

A compelling social history that's sprinkled throughout with Coe's inimitable humour, love and white-hot anger

A hugely impressive state-of-the-nation tale

About Jonathan Coe

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