Number 11
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3.9 • 21 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
This is a novel about the hundreds of tiny connections between the
public and private worlds and how they affect us all.
It's about the legacy of war and the end of innocence.
It's about how comedy and politics are battling it out and comedy might have won.
It's about how 140 characters can make fools of us all.
It's about living in a city where bankers need cinemas in their basements and others need food banks down the street.
It is Jonathan Coe doing what he does best - showing us how we live now.
'Coe is among the handful of novelists who can tell us something about the temper of our times' Observer
Number 11 is Jonathan Coe's eleventh novel. His previous ten novels are all published by Penguin and include the highly acclaimed bestsellers What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep and The Rotters' Club.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sequel to The Winshaw Legacy, two childhood friends, Rachel and Alison, struggle to maintain their friendship and come of age in an England overrun with the alienating forces of modernity: austerity, social media, and capitalism run amok. The book's point of view is widely, admirably panoramic, detailing Rachel's early obsession with the death of David Kelly, Alison's mother's stint on a Survivor-style reality show, and an Oxford professor's search for a long-lost German film reel, as well as the travails of two ideologically mismatched detectives, a bloviating right-wing columnist, and a Romanian dog walker who may or may not transform into a giant spider. Rachel is later employed as a tutor for the children of a tax-dodging billionaire, Sir Gilbert Gunn, whose mammoth home expansion includes the excavation and construction of an 11-story basement. The disparate plots draw near one another but never fully meet in action or in theme; nevertheless, this is still an entertaining satire.
