What a Carve Up!: A wickedly funny take on life under the Thatcher government by the award-winning author of Middle England - Softcover

Coe, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241967791 ISBN 13: 9780241967799

Publisher: Penguin, 2014

Synopsis

A wickedly funny take on life under the Thatcher government by the prize-winning author of Bournvlile.

It is the 1980s and the Winshaw family are getting richer and crueller by the year:

Newspaper-columnist Hilary gets thousands for telling it like it isn't. Henry's turning hospitals into car parks. Roddy's selling art in return for sex. Down on the farm Dorothy's squeezing every last pound from her livestock. Thomas is making a killing on the stock exchange; and Mark is selling arms to dictators.

But once their hapless biographer Michael Owen starts investigating the family's trail of greed, corruption and immoral doings, the time growing ripe for the Winshaws to receive their comeuppance . . .
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'A sustained feat of humour, suspense and polemic, full of twists and ironies' Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times

'A riveting social satire on the chattering and all-powerful upper classes' Time Out

'Big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving' Guardian
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Written with his signature wit, Jonathan Coe's unmissable new novel, The Proof of My Innocence is available now!

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of fifteen novels, including What a Carve Up!, The Rotters’ Club, Middle England and, most recently, The Proof of My Innocence. He has won the Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Européen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, among many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. Jonathan Coe lives in London.

From the Back Cover

A brilliant noir farce, a dystopian vision and the story of an obsession. Michael is a lonely, rather pathetic writer, obsessed by the film, 'What A Carve Up!' in which a mad knifeman cuts his way through the inhabitants of a decrepit stately pile as the thunder rages. Inexplicably, Michael is commissioned to write the family history of the Winshaws, an upper class Yorkshire clan whose members have a finger in every establishment pie. But as a murderous maniac stalks the family, Michael realizes that his favourite film is coming true.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241967791
• ISBN 13: 9780241967799
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512