The Closed Circle
‘As funny as anything Coe has written’ The Times Literary Supplement
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4.0 • 25 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Discover bestselling author Jonathan Coe's hilarious sequel to The Rotters' Club!
It's the end of the century and Benjamin Trotter and friends are all grown up.
Life is a ceaseless whirl of jobs, marriages, kids - and self-inflicted angst. Despite the shiny optimism of Blair's Britain, youthful hopes and dreams feel betrayed. Is the Government (and by extension Benjamin's MP brother Paul) to blame? Or are the 'rotters' themselves - only passingly faithful to their dreams - really at fault?
The Closed Circle depicts a group of former school friends as older, wiser and disillusioned in Blair's Britain at the turn of the millennium, proving that the present can never truly be disentangled from the past.
THE STORY CONTINUES IN MIDDLE ENGLAND.
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'Terrific. An incisive portrait of Britain at the turn of the century' Spectator
'Coe's finest achievement since What a Carve up!' Time Out
'Popular fiction at its best' Daily Mail
Written with his signature wit, Jonathan Coe's unmissable new novel, Bournville, is available to order now!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Rotters' Club (2002), Coe's witty novel of teenage schoolmates growing up in 1970s Birmingham, England, introduced an expansive cast of characters. With echoes of Anthony Trollope and Anthony Powell, this wonderful, compulsively readable sequel explores the adults those young people became it opens in 1999 and closes in 2003 and paints a satirical but moving portrait of life at the turn of the century. Claire Newman still mourns her sister, who vanished without a trace in The Rotters' Club. Benjamin Trotter still mourns his one true (teenage) love. His brother, Paul, is an ambitious member of Parliament in "Blair's Brave New Britain." Doug Anderton and Philip Chase became journalists, and the first book's other characters all reappear in some way or another (along with flashbacks to many of their teenage escapades). Coe cleverly works real events into the plot London's Millennium Eve, the possible shutdown of a British auto manufacturer, the war in Iraq. The theme, as in The Rotters' Club, concerns the conflicts and connections between individual decisions and societal events, but while Coe's political sensibility is readily apparent, this novel, with its incredibly well developed characters and its immensely engaging narrative, is no polemical tract. It's a compelling, dramatic and often funny depiction of the way we live now both savage and heartfelt at the same time.
