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What a Carve Up!
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  • Published: 25 March 2010
  • ISBN: 9780141806600
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $12.99

What a Carve Up!

‘Everything a novel ought to be: courageous, challenging, funny, sad’ The Times

Formats & editions
EBook
3 Sept 2008
Audiobook
25 Apr 2019
Audiobook
25 Mar 2010
Paperback
1 Oct 2016
Paperback
27 Aug 2014
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'Probably the best English novelist of his generation' Nick Hornby

The downloadable audiobook edition of Jonathan's Coe satirical masterpiece, What a Carve Up!

A brilliant noir farce, a dystopian vision of Britain, a family history and the story of an obsession. Michael is a lonely, rather pathetic writer, obsessed by the film, 'What A Carve Up!' in which a mad knifeman cuts his way through the inhabitants of a decrepit stately pile as the thunder rages. Inexplicably he is commissioned to write the family history of the Winshaws, an upper class Yorkshire clan whose members have a finger in every establishment pie, from arms dealing to art dealing, from politics to banking to the popular press and factory farming. During his researches Michael realises that the Winshaws have cast a blight on his life, as they have on Britain. His confidence, his sexual and personal identity begin to reform. In a climax set in the Winshaw's family seat the novel turns into the film, 'What A Carve Up!' as a murderous maniac stalks the family and Michael discovers the significance of Shirley Eaton's lingerie.

'Everything a novel ought to be: courageous, challenging, funny, sad - and peopled with a fine troupe of characters' The Times

Abridged.

Read by Alex Jennings.
  • Published: 25 March 2010
  • ISBN: 9780141806600
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $12.99
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About the author

Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of fifteen novels, including What a Carve Up!, The Rotters’ Club, Middle England and, most recently, The Proof of My Innocence. He has won the Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Européen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, among many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. Jonathan Coe lives in London.

JC

Also by Jonathan Coe

The Proof of My Innocence
Bournville
Mr Wilder and Me
Middle England
The Broken Mirror
Number 11
Loggerheads And Other Stories
See all

Praise for What a Carve Up!

A sustained feat of humour, suspense and polemic, full of twists and ironies

Hilary Mantel

A riveting social satire on the chattering and all-powerful upper classes

Time Out

Big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving

Guardian

Everything a novel ought to be: courageous, challenging, funny, sad - and peopled with a fine troupe of characters

The Times

A grand blast of popular literary entertainment

Laurence O'Toole, New Statesman

One of the most ambitious novels I have read in years and one which has pulled off the seemingly impossible trick of managing to be both amiable and angry at the same time

Spectator

A carve-up of contemporary Britain, What a Carve Up! is also a carve-up of a book, a vertiginous, exquisitely calculated collage of texts-within-texts... one of the few pieces of genuinely political post-modern fiction around

London Review of Books

An unusually entertaining novel, as well as being politically ambitious... it manages to switch from one tone to another with extraordinary deftness

BBC Radio Four

Coe effortlessly spans fifty years of British political change in this hugely entertaining novel, packed full of period detail, from forties schoolboy slang to modern media wars

Lavinia Greenlaw, Vogue