Expo 58
A brilliant and funny spy novel set at the 1958 World Fair from the award-winning author of Middle England
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- 8,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Expo 58 - Good-looking girls and sinister spies: a naive Englishman at loose in Europe in Jonathan Coe's brilliant comic novel
London, 1958: unassuming civil servant Thomas Foley is plucked from his desk at the Central Office of Information and sent on a six-month trip to Brussels. His task: to keep an eye on The Brittania, a brand new pub which will form the heart of the British presence at Expo 58 - the biggest World's Fair of the century, and the first to be held since the Second World War.
As soon as he arrives at the site, Thomas feels that he has escaped a repressed, backward-looking country and fallen headlong into an era of modernity and optimism. He is equally bewitched by the surreal, gigantic Atomium, which stands at the heart of this brave new world, and by Anneke, the lovely Flemish hostess who meets him off his plane. But Thomas's new-found sense of freedom comes at a price: the Cold War is at its height, the mischievous Belgians have placed the American and Soviet pavilions right next to each other - and why is he being followed everywhere by two mysterious emissaries of the British Secret Service? Expo 58 may represent a glittering future, both for Europe and for Thomas himself, but he will soon be forced to decide where his public and private loyaties really lie.
For fans of Jonathan Coe's classic comic bestsellers What a Carve Up! and The Rotters' Club, this hilarious new novel, which is set in the Mad Men period of the mid 50s, will also be loved by readers of Nick Hornby, William Boyd and Ian McEwan.
'Coe has huge powers of observation and enormous literary panache' Sunday Times
'No one marries formal ingenuity with inclusiveness of tone more elegantly' Time Out
'Coe is among the handful of novelists who can tell us something about the temper of our times' Observer
'Thank goodness for Jonathan Coe, who records what Britain has lost in the past thirty years in his elegiac fiction' Scotland on Sunday
Jonathan Coe's novels are filled with moving, astute observations of life and love, and are written with a revealing honesty that has captivated a generation of readers. His other titles, The Accidental Woman, The Rotters' Club (winner of the Everyman Wodehouse prize), The Closed Circle, 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), Middle England (Costa Novel Award), Mr Wilder and Me and Bournville are all available in Penguin paperback.
Written with his signature wit, Jonathan Coe's unmissable new novel, The Proof of My Innocence, is available to order now!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thomas Foley, the hero of this small-scale but impressive novel about the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels, is the quintessential English everyman. Middle-class and middlebrow, he lives in a London suburb with his wife, Sylvia, and their baby daughter while quietly plying his trade as a mid-level functionary for Britain's Central Office for Information. He is honored when his bosses tap him to manage the Britannia, an "authentic English pub" planned as part of the official British presence at the fair. The job requires him to be in Belgium for several months, and the sojourn is utterly life-changing. The plot mixes romance (with beautiful Belgian hostess Anneke) and decidedly comic intrigue (two bumbling British spies, Wayne and Radford, and an equally transparent Soviet agent). Coe is a gifted satirist (The Winshaw Legacy: or What a Carve Up!), and he subtly works in big themes here: Britain trying to finds its place in the postwar European landscape, and Britons trying to find their place in the postwar British class system. Coe uses period detail and historical fact smoothly, and the result is a droll, clever novel that ends on a bittersweet note.
