Middle England
A Novel (Costa Novel Award)
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A comedy for our times” (The Guardian), Middle England is a piercing and provocative novel about a country in crisis. From the frenzy of the 2012 Olympics to the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, here Jonathan Coe chronicles the story of modern Britain by way of a cast of characters whose world is being upended.
There are newlyweds who disagree about the country’s future and, possibly, their relationship; a political commentator who writes impassioned columns about austerity from his lavish town house while his radical teenage daughter undertakes a relentless quest for universal justice; and Benjamin Trotter, who embarks on an apparently doomed new career in middle age, and his father, whose last wish is to vote to leave the European Union. A sequel to The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle that stands entirely alone, Middle England is a darkly comic look at our strange new world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coe's excellent novel, the third in a trilogy, picks up his characters' lives roughly a decade after the events of The Closed Circle and finds them settled into "the quiet satisfactions of under-achievement" in later middle age in England. Benjamin Trotter, the sentimental would-be novelist, has retired to a bucolic converted mill house; his old classmate Doug Anderton, a leftist journalist, lives comfortably off his wife's fortune; and his sister, Lois, has reached a pleasant, if unexciting, plateau in her career and marriage. Their sense of complacency is lost soon enough; Brexit, and the larger referendum on British identity, looms over the novel, throwing established characters into bewildered frustration and new, younger characters notably Benjamin's niece Sophie, an art historian, and Doug's teenage daughter, Coriander onto the front lines of the culture war. Doug spars with a flippant young communications staffer for then prime minister David Cameron, who seems to speak a different language; Sophie's marriage is upended by conflicting views on Brexit, and she finds herself the target of Coriander's campus activism; Benjamin's ailing father clings to life just long enough to vote "Leave." It's a neat pastiche of the cultural flash points of the past decade, done with humor and empathy. While Coe's own politics will be clear to the reader, the novel is a remarkable portrait of a country at an inflection point.
