Bournville: From the bestselling author of Middle England

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There is an awful lot to fit in. Political upheaval and awkward class dynamics are set against Britain's obsessive relationship with the royal family and shifting attitudes towards multiculturalism and gay rights. But underpinning it all is the uneasy (often unspoken) debate raging over what it means to be British -- or, perhaps more accurately, English." - Rachel Cunliffe, New Statesman Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His novels include Rotters, The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death and What a Carve Up!, which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Itranger. The House of Sleep won the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award for 1997.

The book also builds a deeper integrity out of echoes and motifs, like a piece of music. The phrase “all that caper”, a particular corner of a Birmingham pub, a yellow cravat, a line of Latin verse, the sound of laughter in a school playground – all set off chains of associations that ripple throughout the novel. A piece of casual homophobia will be recalled decades later by a son trying to come to terms with his sexual orientation. Someone in a previous GR review of this book (Kay Dunham) described the style as similar to that of the Famous Five, this is exactly it. It does try your patience, though, to be treated like that as a reader: everything being spelled out for you, it makes you feel stupid at times. 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. Coe has the great gift of combining engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft Guardian Honorary Graduates of Birmingham City University". Birmingham City University. Archived from the original on 27 August 2018 . Retrieved 28 January 2015.

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E’ curioso che quasi in contemporanea, ma con ben altro piglio e personaggi meno pallidi e più sfaccettati, anche Ian McEwan abbia pubblicato un romanzo fiume biografico che a sua volta interpreta in filigrana la recente storia d’Inghilterra, benché in quel caso il racconto sia meno corale e molto più incentrato sul protagonista e sulle figure femminili che ne condizionano l’esistenza. List of honorary graduates since 2000" (PDF). University of Birmingham . Retrieved 28 January 2015. In 2012 Coe was invited by Javier Marías to become a duke of the kingdom of Redonda. He chose as his title "Duke of Prunes", after a favourite piece of music by Frank Zappa.

So Bournbrook, they decided, would not quite do. A variation was chosen. Bournville. The name of a village not just founded upon, and devoted to, but actually dreamed into being by chocolate.

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