The Winshaw Legacy: Or, What a Carve Up! (Vintage International) - Softcover

Coe, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679754059 ISBN 13: 9780679754053

Publisher: Vintage, 1996

Synopsis

A postmodern detective story, a scathing send-up of the rapacious eighties, a macabre Gothic - all rolled up in a bravura tragicomic entertainment. The Winshaw family, as their official biographer is warned by old Mortimer Winshaw himself, is 'the meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of backstabbing penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth.' Bankers, industrialists, politicians, arms dealers and media barons - they rule Britannia, more or less. They also have a guilty secret in the shape of a mad aunt stashed away in a remote asylum, convinced of familial treachery during World War II and determined to effect the ruin of her entire clan. In the summer of 1990, while Saddam Hussein is provoking yet another war, the Winshaws' biographer (a severely depressed young novelist) is piecing together the truth of their sordid legacy, and discovers that it converges bizarrely with the plot of a film he's been obsessed by since childhood. Moreover, it seems that all of this, dynasty and cinema alike, has some mysterious connection with his own troubled history. Of course whether he - or anybody else - will be alive when this compound riddle is solved remains to be seen. Savagely funny, hugely inventive and passionately political, The Winshaw Legacy assumes Dickensian proportions as it excoriates the modern age of greed - and heralds the American debut of an extraordinary writer.

About this title

About the Author:

Born in Birmingham in 1961, Jonathan Coe took degrees from Cambridge and Warwick universities. He lives in London.

From the Inside Flap:

ommend The Winshaw Legacy as I a superb political novel, or as a fiendishly clever meta-novel, or as a unique modern historical novel, or as a riveting family saga, but I'm afraid that would drive everyone, yawning in terror, straight out of the bookstore. So let's just say it has naked pictures of Natasha Richardson...Can't say that? Well, let's say it's a nasty farce with lots of bathroom humor and violence which reminds me at least as much of Fawlty Towers as it does of Midnight's Children.'

-- Jay McInerney

A postmodern detective story, a scathing send-up of the rapacious eighties, a macabre Gothic -- all rolled up in a bravura tragicomic entertainment.

The Winshaw family, as their official biographer is warned by old Mortimer Winshaw himself, is the meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of backstabbing penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth.' Bankers, industrialists, politicians, arms dealers and media barons -- they rule Britann

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679754059
• ISBN 13: 9780679754053
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 512