Description
PUBLISHING ON 2 OCTOBER - PREORDER NOW.
'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
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?
'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