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  • Published: 6 February 2014
  • ISBN: 9780241966914
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

Expo 58




Good-looking girls and sinister spies: a naive Englishman at loose in Europe in Jonathan Coe's brilliant comic novel

London, 1958: unassuming civil servant Thomas Foley is plucked from his desk job at the Central Office of Information and sent on a six-month trip to Brussels. His task: to keep an eye on The Britannia, a brand new pub which will form the heart of the British presence at Expo 58 - the biggest World's Fair of the century.

As soon as he arrives at the site, Thomas feels that he has escaped a repressed, backward-looking country and fallen headlong into an era of modernity and optimism. He is equally bewitched by the surreal, gigantic Atomium, which stands at the heart of this brave new world, and by Anneke, the lovely Flemish hostess who meets him off his plane. But Thomas's new-found sense of freedom comes at a price: the Cold War is at its height, the mischievous Belgians have placed the American and Soviet pavilions right next to each other, and why is he being followed everywhere by two mysterious emissaries of the British Secret service? Expo 58 may represent a glittering future, both for Europe and for Thomas himself, but he will soon be forced to decide where his public and private loyalties really lie.

Returning to the acidic humour of What a Carve Up! and The Rotters' Club, Jonathan Coe's new novel stirs elements of ealing comedy, Hitchcockian thriller and political farce into an incisive, affecting portrait of Britain as it stands at a postwar crossroads, faced with crucial choices between America and Europe, the future and the past.

  • Published: 6 February 2014
  • ISBN: 9780241966914
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

About the author

Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His novels include Rotters, The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death and What a Carve Up!, which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Itranger.The House of Sleep won the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award for 1997.

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham, UK, in 1961. He began writing at an early age. His first surviving story, a detective thriller called The Castle of Mystery, was written when he was eight. His first published novel was The Accidental Woman in 1987, but it was his fourth, What a Carve Up!, that established his reputation as one of England’s finest comic novelists, winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1985 and being translated into many languages. Seven bestselling novels and many other awards have followed, including the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for Like A Fiery Elephant, a biography of the experimental novelist, B. S. Johnson. Jonathan lives in London with his wife and two daughters.

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