The Rotters' Club: ‘One of those sweeping, ambitious yet hugely readable, moving, richly comic novels’ Daily Telegraph (The Rotters' Club, 1) - Softcover

Coe, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241967767 ISBN 13: 9780241967768

Publisher: Penguin, 2014

Synopsis

The Rotters' Club - Jonathan Coe's iconic 1970s coming-of-age novel

Winner of the Everyman Wodehouse prize, The Rotters' Club follows Benjamin Trotter - bestselling author Jonathan Coe's most iconic character - through the hilarious and, at times, touching trials and tribulations of growing up in 1970s Britain.

Unforgettably funny and painfully honest, Jonathan Coe's tale of Benjamin Trotter and his friends' coming of age during the 1970s is a heartfelt celebration of the joys and agonies of growing up.

Featuring, among other things, IRA bombs, prog rock, punk rock, bad poetry, first love, love on the side. Prefects, detention, a few bottles of Blue Nun, lots of brown wallpaper, industrial strife, and divine intervention in the form of a pair of swimming trunks.

Set against the backdrop of the decade's class struggles, tragic and riotous by turns, packed with thwarted romance and furtive sex, The Rotters' Club will be enjoyed by readers of Nick Hornby and William Boyd and anyone who ever experienced adolescence the hard way.

'One of those sweeping, ambitious yet hugely readable, moving and richly comic novels that you find all too rarely in English fiction...a masterpiece' Daily Telegraph

'Very funny...a compulsive and gripping read. Coe had achieved that rare feat: a novel stuffed with characters you really care for' The Times

'A book to cherish, a book to reread, a book to buy for all your friends' Independent on Sunday

Jonathan Coe's novels are filled with biting political satire, moving and astute observations of life and hilarious set pieces that have made him one of the most popular writers of his generation. His other titles, The Closed Circle (sequel to The Rotters' Club), The Accidental Woman, The Dwarves of Death, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, The House of Sleep (winner of the 1998 Prix Médicis Étranger), A Touch of Love, What a Carve Up! (winner of the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize) and The Rain Before it Falls, are all available in Penguin paperback.

About this title

Review:

At a time when people are looking back on the 1970s with nostalgia, Jonathan What a Carve Up Coe's The Rotters' Club is a timely reminder of quite how ghastly that benighted decade was in Britain. Set in the "industrial" heartland of the West Midlands, it chronicles the growing pains of four Brummie schoolboys--Philip, Sean, Doug and Benjamin--who must not only come to terms with the normal pangs of adolescence but with terrible knitwear, ludicrous pop-music, nightmarish food and insidious racism, all set against the awful, surreal and tragicomic reality of a post-imperial nation.

The book suffers in its programmatic attempts to make the four boys and their families symbolise, or represent, Something Important To Do With British Life. Doug, for instance, symbolises Industrial Decline, via his dad, a shop steward at the doomed British Leyland Longbridge plant. For Sean its Sexual Liberation--at least he's the one that looks most likely to get his rocks off. And young Ben Trotter would appear to represent A Young Jonathan Coe. But if this aspect of the novel seems contrived, then the author's capricious, deft, wryly comedic and touchingly empathetic style keeps things chugging along, as he knits together the troubles and tragedies of some fairly ordinary people living through fairly extraordinary years. --Sean Thomas

Review:

One of those sweeping, ambitious yet hugely readable, moving, richly comic novels that you find all too rarely in English fiction ... a masterpiece (Daily Telegraph)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0241967767
• ISBN 13: 9780241967768
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416