The Proof of My Innocence: A hilarious new novel from the bestselling author of Middle England - Softcover

Coe, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1405962410 ISBN 13: 9781405962414

Publisher: Penguin, 2025

Synopsis

'My comfort read: anything by Jonathan Coe' Bob Mortimer

'Coe channels his anger and frustration at the direction his country has taken, as well as his abiding love for it, into prose of enduring beauty' Guardian

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Post-university life doesn’t suit Phyl. Time passes slowly, living with her parents and working a zero-hours contract at Heathrow Airport, while her budding plans of becoming a writer are going nowhere.

That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He’s been investigating a radical think tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that’s been scheming to push the British government in an ever more extreme direction. When he follows this story to a conference in a rambling old hotel deep in the Cotswolds, events take a bizarre and sinister turn. Soon he is caught up in a world of cryptic clues, secret passages and, eventually, murder.

In the end, despite the efforts of a suitably eccentric detective, it falls to Phyl herself – ably assisted by Chris’s outspoken adopted daughter Rashida - to look for answers to the fatal mystery. But will they lie in contemporary politics, or in a literary enigma that is almost forty years old?

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'A new Jonathan Coe is always a treat . . . Coe is a master at exploring the pains of modern life' Rosamund Urwin, The Times

'Please, God … if there’s a next life, let me write as well as Jonathan Coe' Anthony Bourdain

'Probably the best English novelist of his generation' Nick Hornby

'Deeply pleasurable, and a lot of fun. You emerge from it glowing' iPaper


Written with his signature wit and warmth, Jonathan Coe's unmissable new novel, LESSONS IN HARMONY is available for pre-order 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

When Phyl, a young literature graduate, moves back home with her parents, she soon finds herself frustrated by the narrow horizons of English country life. As for her plans of becoming a writer, those are going nowhere. But the chance discovery of a forgotten novelist from the 1980s stirs her into action, as does a visit from her uncle Richard - especially when he tells her that he’s working on a political story that might put his life in danger.

Richard has been following the careers of a group of stud

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1405962410
• ISBN 13: 9781405962414
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352