The Rotters' Club

"At once uproariously entertaining and deadly serious—a comedy of manners and mores, but also a conscientious and politically charged reminder of an age quite easily forgotten, yet not far removed from our own.”
—Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement


The acclaimed author of The Winshaw Legacy—an epic satire of the eighties—now turns to the previous decade, which is to recent history what adolescence is to life itself: awkward, fervent, confused, sweetly naïve, and oh-so-painfully familiar, yet also far less tiresomely ironic than what we’ve come to.

Our principal guides to this collective coming-of-age story are four boys, classmates and friends, who must cope with their own hopes and traumas as well as their country’s, at a time when industrial and uncool Birmingham is on the cutting edge of Britain’s economic crisis and the air is filled with upheaval and change—from class antagonism and Northern Ireland to new music and morals.

As for parents, it goes without saying that they don’t help one little bit. Witnessing marital dissatisfaction lends no assurance to anyone facing the difficulties of holding a band together; of refining one’s creativity, politics, or (god forbid) faith; of surviving classroom rivalries and racism and romance.

Comic, wistful, revisionist, and even romantic, seamlessly adjoining issues both intimately personal and broadly political, “the novel is filled with characters whose destinies we care about, whose welfare moves us,” wrote William Sutcliffe in The Independent (U.K.). “This is the simplest, but the highest calling of literature. The Rotters’ Club is a book to cherish, a book to reread, a book to buy for all your friends.”

Jonathan Coe has received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Prix Médicis Etranger, and, for The Rotters’ Club, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for the most original comic writing.