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  • Published: 3 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241986479
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $22.99

The Rotters' Club




The bestselling comic novel, now a Penguin Essential

Unforgettably funny and painfully honest, Jonathan Coe's tale of Benjamin Trotter and his friends' coming of age during the 1970s is a heartfelt celebration of the joys and agonies of growing up.

Featuring, among other things, IRA bombs, prog rock, punk rock, bad poetry, first love, love on the side, prefects, detention, a few bottles of Blue Nun, lots of brown wallpaper, industrial strife, and divine intervention in the form of a pair of swimming trunks.

Set against the backdrop of the decade's class struggles, tragic and riotous by turns, packed with thwarted romance and furtive sex, The Rotters' Club is for anyone who ever experienced adolescence the hard way.

  • Published: 3 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241986479
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 416
  • RRP: $22.99

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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Praise for The Rotters' Club

One of those sweeping, ambitious yet hugely readable, moving and richly comic novels that you find all too rarely in English fiction ... a masterpiece

Daily Telegraph

Very funny ... a compulsive and gripping read. Coe has achieved that rare feat: a novel stuffed with characters you really care for

The Times

A book to cherish, a book to reread, a book to buy for all your friends

Independent on Sunday