Birmingham, England, c. 1973: industrial strikes, bad pop music, corrosive class warfare, adolescent angst, IRA bombings. Four friends: a class clown who stoops very low for a laugh; a confused artist enthralled by guitar rock; an earnest radical with socialist leanings; and a quiet dreamer obsessed with poetry, God, and the prettiest girl in school. As the world appears to self-destruct around them, they hold together to navigate the choppy waters of a decidedly ambiguous decade.
Industry Reviews
"Reflective and compelling, satirical and tender, wildly imaginative and painstakingly realistic." -Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post Book World "The gritty, cross-pond equivalent to Look Homeward, Angel. . . . The pangs of embarrassment, the anguish of uncertainty, the awkwardness of success [are] vividly present here." - Mike Francis, The Oregonian
"Funny and astute . . . The strength of The Rotters' Club lies in its comic humanity." - Stephen Amidon, The Atlantic Monthly
"Please, God . . . if there's a next life, let me write as well as Jonathan Coe. The Rotters' Club offers a thick slice of seventies Birmingham-sharp, acerbic, and menacingly true; a sad, funny, thoroughly engaging look at compromise, complicity, and change in a decade many of us would choose to forget." -Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour
"Its tinder-dry combustion of comic, indignant and elegiac suggests an Evelyn Waugh of the left." -Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review
"A thrillingly traitorous work. It hums along for a hundred pages of wise comedy about teenage love's mortifications, then cold cocks us with an honest surprise as cruel as it is earned." -David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
"Jonathan Coe is a mesmerizing writer. . . . The Rotters' Club is a wonderfully gripping novel, by turns funny, heartbreaking and terrifying." -The Seattle Times
"The novel's many intricate parts manage to mesh and turn with the startling harmony you find in Robert Altman's movies." -Todd Pruzan, The Village Voice
"If there's a contemporary novelist who combines sharp and sometimes savage social commentary with the classic, full-blooded pleasures novels are supposed to give readers as well as Jonathan Coe does, I must have missed him." -Charles Taylor, Salon.com
and from the UK . . .
"A must-read for anyone who cares about contemporary literature." -Katie Owen, The Telegraph
"Filled with characters whose destinies we care about, whose welfare moves us. This is the simplest but highest calling of literature." -William Sutcliffe, The Independent on Sunday
"As always with Jonathan Coe, the sheer intelligent good nature that suffuses his work makes it a pleasure to read." -Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
"As a study of adolescence, it is hard to beat. The aching naivety and intensity of the main characters made me think of Salinger." -John de Falbe, The Spectator
"Coe handles his complex approach to a complex era effortlessly, and the end product is a compulsive and gripping read." -Paul Connolly, The Times
"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
"Like all of Coe's novels, The Rotters' Club is brilliant, funny, apposite, informed and unflaggingly truth-seeking." -Rachel Cusk, The Evening Standard
"Superior entertainment. The pages seem to turn themselves." -Hugo Barnacle, The New Statesman
