LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Tender and wickedly funny, Jonathan Coe’s Bournville takes readers on a sweeping, stirring journey through British history – seventy-five years’ worth of lives bound up in Britain’s social shifts, from VE Day, through to COVID tragedies.
The family at the heart of this deliciously engaging social saga live in picture-perfect, peaceful Bournville, a suburb of Birmingham and home to the famous chocolate factory that’s employed most residents for decades. We first meet Mary as an eleven-year-old in 1945, when she’s swept up in VE Day celebrations, and follow her family through pivotal moments in British history — the coronation; England winning the World Cup in 1966; the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969; the 1981 wedding of Charles and Diana; Diana’s funeral in 1997.
More recent moments include Euro-scepticism of the nineties, as revealed through the “chocolate war” with Brussels, with pertinent references to Boris Johnson’s ambition, arrogance, charisma and rule-breaking at that time. Then there’s the outbreak of COVID in 2020 - the lockdowns, the 75th anniversary of VE Day, the agonising loneliness, and devastating loss.
In characteristic style, Coe’s observations are delivered in the authentic voices of his characters, lightly peppered with occasional amusing interjections from the narrator. With its heart-rending ending made all the more poignant by the Author’s Note, Bournville is a cleverly constructed, consummately compelling account of British lives. As Mary’s mother Doll observes near the start of the novel: “Past, present and future: that was what she heard in the sound of the children’s voices from the playground… Everything changes, and everything stays the same”, which cuts to the core of this beautifully-told story.
Joanne Owen
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Bournville Synopsis
From the bestselling, award-winning author of Middle England comes a profoundly moving, brutally funny and brilliantly true portrait of Britain told through four generations of one family.
In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For eleven-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it's the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades.
Mary will go on to live through the Coronation and the World Cup final, royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. She'll have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, as modern life and the city crowd in on their peaceful enclave.
As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the World Wide Web, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary's family - and their country - closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before?
Bournville is a rich and poignant new novel from the bestselling, Costa award-winning author of Middle England. It is the story of a woman, of a nation's love affair with chocolate, of Britain itself.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780241517406 |
| Publication date: |
31st August 2023 |
| Author: |
Jonathan Coe |
| Publisher: |
Viking an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
368 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Historical Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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Press Reviews
Jonathan Coe Press Reviews
'Very tempting' The Times
'A compelling social history that's sprinkled throughout with Coe's inimitable humour, love and white-hot anger' Evening Standard
'This is another eminently readable Coe, full of believable characters and fizzing dialogue. And it couldn't be more timely' Big Issue
'Told with compassion, steadiness, decency and always a glint in the eye, this is a novel that both challenges and delights. For anyone who has felt lost in the past six years, it is like meeting an ally' Rachel Joyce, author of Miss Benson's Beetle Coe
'A writer of uncommon decency - reminds us that the way out of this mess is through moderation, through compromise, through that age-old English ability to laugh at ourselves' Observer on Middle England
'A pertinent, entertaining study of a nation in crisis' Financial Times on Middle England
'Middle England is a full-blooded state of the nation novel, and it brings us bang up-to-date' Sunday Times on Middle England
'A wickedly funny, clever, but also tender and lyrical novel about Britain and Britishness and what we have become' Rachel Joyce
'It is miraculous how, in his new novel, Coe has created a social history of postwar Britain as we are still living it. Bournville is a beautiful, and often very funny, tribute to an underexamined place and also a truly moving story of how a country discovered tolerance' Sathnam Sanghera, bestselling author of Empireland
Author
About Jonathan Coe
Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. Expo 58 is his tenth novel. The previous nine are all available in Penguin: The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up! (which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), The House of Sleep (which won the 1998 Prix Medicis Etranger), The Rotters' Club (winner of the Everyman Wodehouse Prize), The Closed Circle, The Rain Before It Falls and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. His biography of the novelist B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, won the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction book of the year.
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