Middle England, Paperback

The first great Brexit novel, and the final volume in the trilogy that began with The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle

Beginning nine years ago, in an England where car factories have been replaced by chain retail, and both frenzied riots and Olympic fever plague the streets of London, Middle England tracks a brilliantly vivid cast of characters through the transformation of their society. There are newlyweds who disagree about the country's future and, possibly, their relationship; a political commentator who writes impassioned columns about austerity from his Chelsea townhouse while his radical, teenage daughter undertakes a relentless quest for universal justice; and Benjamin Trotter, who embarks on an apparently doomed new career in middle age, and his father, whose last wish is to vote LEAVE in the Brexit referendum. Through these lives, the novel probes this very tentatively united kingdom itself: a place of nostalgia and delusion, bewilderment and barely suppressed rage. A sequel to The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle that also stands entirely alone as a compassionate look at our strange new world, Middle England is a novel only Jonathan Coe could have written.

JONATHAN COE's awards include the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix du Meilleur Livre tranger, the Prix M dicis tranger, and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing. He lives in London with his wife and their two daughters.