Jonathan Coe

«Bournville»

La Société de Lecture est heureuse de vous convier à une rencontre avec Jonathan Coe.

Born in 1961 in Birmingham, Jonathan Coe is one of the major authors of current British literature. His works feature characters who are prey to the political and social changes of contemporary England. His works include What a Carve Up! (Best Foreign Book Award 1996), The House of Sleep (Prix Médicis étranger 1998), The Rotters’ Club, The Closed Circle, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, Number 11 or : Tales That Witness Madness and Middle England (European Book Prize 2019).

His last novel, Bournville, a life in seven occasions (Un royaume désuni, Gallimard) is a family fresco punctuated by seven key moments of the last seventy-five years of English history. The action takes place mainly in Bournville, a town near Birmingham, which at the time held the largest chocolate factory in the country, that of Cadbury. There are many twists and turns in this impressively wide-ranging novel, which skillfully links the fate of a family, a famous factory and a country. A great Jonathan Coe, and probably his most autobiographical book, as it is a beautiful tribute to his mother, and the most political too, with a particularly pungent look at Boris Johnson, Brexit and the English management of the Covid pandemic.

Crédit photo: © F. Mantovani

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Société de Lecture – Genève