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Bournville Jonathan Coe

Bournville By Jonathan Coe

Bournville by Jonathan Coe


£6,50
New RRP £20,00
Condition - Very Good
7 in stock

Bournville Summary

Bournville: From the bestselling author of Middle England by Jonathan Coe

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Middle England comes a profoundly moving, brutally funny and brilliantly true portrait of Britain told through four generations of one family. The perfect gift for book lovers this Christmas!

'A wickedly funny, clever, but also tender and lyrical novel about Britain and Britishness and what we have become' Rachel Joyce

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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 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. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, as modern life and the city crowd in on their peaceful enclave.

As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the World Wide Web, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary's family - and their country - closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before?

Bournville is a rich and poignant new novel from the bestselling, Costa award-winning author of Middle England. It is the story of a woman, of a nation's love affair with chocolate, of Britain itself.

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'It is miraculous how, in his new novel, Coe has created a social history of postwar Britain as we are still living it. Bournville is a beautiful, and often very funny, tribute to an underexamined place and also a truly moving story of how a country discovered tolerance' Sathnam Sanghera, bestselling author of Empireland

'Epic in scope, but personal in resonance' Elizabeth Day

Bournville Reviews

Very tempting * The Times *
A compelling social history that's sprinkled throughout with Coe's inimitable humour, love and white-hot anger * Evening Standard *
A hugely impressive state-of-the-nation tale * Observer *
This charming read is as warming, rich and comforting as a mug of hot chocolate * The Times *
This is another eminently readable Coe, full of believable characters and fizzing dialogue. And it couldn't be more timely * Big Issue *
Coe has the great gift of combining engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft * Guardian *
Told with compassion, steadiness, decency and always a glint in the eye, this is a novel that both challenges and delights. For anyone who has felt lost in the past six years, it is like meeting an ally -- Rachel Joyce, author of Miss Benson's Beetle
As the latest in J Coe's Unrest sequence, Bournville is one of the most warm-hearted, brilliant and beguiling of his State of the Nation novels. To show three generations of an ordinary Midlands family, their paths taken and not taken, their friends, lovers, jobs, achievements and losses; to interweave this with 75 years of national history - and to do so with such a lightness of touch is a tremendous achievement. All the absurdities of our nation wrapped up in something as bitter, sweet, and addictive as a bar of the best Bournville chocolate -- Amanda Craig, author of The Golden Rule
Coe is an eminently readable novelist * Daily Mail *
A compelling social history that's sprinkled throughout with Coe's inimitable humour, love and white-hot anger * Evening Standard *
Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state of the nation novel: Jonathan Coe is one of them * New Statesman *
For all the novel's satirical tang and historical sweep, it's at root a tender portrait of apparently simple folk trying to fathom the mystery of their own personalities * Spectator *
A tender portrayal of the state of the nation through the prism of family relationships * Woman & Home *
There is much to enjoy here, as in all Coe's novels * Scotsman *
This is another eminently readable Coe, full of believable characters and fizzing dialogue. And it couldn't be more timely * Big Issue *
[Coe] has a huge talent for balancing humour with poignancy * Book of the month, Good Housekeeping *

About Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe was born a few miles from Bournville in 1961. The author of political satires such as What a Carve Up! and Number 11, and family sagas such as The Rotters' Club and The Rain Before It Falls, his novels have won prizes at home and abroad, including Costa Novel of the Year and the Prix du Livre Europeen (both for Middle England).

Additional information

GOR012688489
9780241517383
0241517389
Bournville: From the bestselling author of Middle England by Jonathan Coe
Used - Very Good
Hardback
Penguin Books Ltd
2022-11-03
368
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Bournville