What a Carve Up!
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  • Published: 3 September 2008
  • ISBN: 9780141918334
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 512

What a Carve Up!

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

Formats & editions
EBook
3 Sep 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

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 kinfeman 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 realizes 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 lingere.
  • Published: 3 September 2008
  • ISBN: 9780141918334
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 512
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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.

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
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