Bournville: From the bestselling author of Middle England

Product Information

He had long toyed with the idea of writing a novel set during the week of Princess Diana’s funeral, but he wanted to take a longer view than he has in the past. The public reaction to the Queen’s death – in particular “the queue” – confirmed his growing belief “that we’re a nation mainly driven by emotion”, he says. Where he used to regard events such as the response to Diana’s death and the Brexit referendum as “turning points, moments when the country changed direction”, now he is not so sure. Instead, he sees them as “symptoms” of a national identity crisis that has been brewing for decades. “We are starting to look like a country that is not driven by facts and evidence and reason at all, but in the far extremes of Brexitland by a kind of fantasy and wishful thinking.” In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For eleven-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it's the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades. Mary will go on to live through the Coronation and the World Cup final, royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. She'll have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, as modern life and the city crowd in on their peaceful enclave. She will have three sons and two of them will have children and THOSE children will have children and, in the meantime, things will inexorably change. Even here in the former colonies, the seven events that shape this novel – VE Day, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, the World Cup Final, the investiture of Charles, Prince of Wales, the wedding of Charles and Diana, Diana’s funeral, and the 75th anniversary of VE Day – spark emotions. It is miraculous how, in his new novel, Coe has created a social history of postwar Britain as we are still living it. Bournville is a beautiful, and often very funny, tribute to an underexamined place and also a truly moving story of how a country discovered tolerance' Sathnam Sanghera, bestselling author of Empireland

This is another eminently readable Coe, full of believable characters and fizzing dialogue. And it couldn't be more timely Big Issue Unlike most such family sagas, Coe's seven-occasion timeline means that the novel often doesn't cover what are generally significant events in the lives of the characters: from one section to the next, for example, we find family members married or now with kids, while the actual weddings and births happen off-screen.The title of the novel refers to the town that candy-manufacturer Cadbury built (the Hershey, Pennsylvania, of the UK ...): A few weeks ago I read and reviewed Ian McEwan‘s most recent novel Lessons. One of the key themes of the novel was how certain major world events affected the main character, a man who was the same age as McEwan, though whose life was very different from McEwan’s. Bournville έχει φτιαχτεί για να στεγάσει τους εργάτες της Cadbury), με νοσταλγικές και πραγματιστικές νότες παράλληλα, την προσθήκη φυτικού λίπους στις βρετανικές σοκολάτες εν καιρώ πολέμου λόγω ελλείψεων και την μάχη στην Ευρώπη για το αν οι εγγλέζικες σοκολάτες μπορούν να θεωρηθούν «σοκολάτες» ή αν πρέπει να τους αποδοθεί άλλο όνομα (και πώς γράφεται το όνομα "Παπασταθόπουλος"). Μέσα σε αυτό το χαμό, μαθαίνουμε και για την πρώτη αποτυχημένη υποψηφιότητα (καταδικασμένη a priori, στην πραγματικότητα) του Μπόρις, σε έναν παραδοσιακά "εργατικό" δήμο, όπου δε θα είχε καμία τύχη (κι ��μως, το τόλμησε). Εδώ διαφαίνεται ένας θαυμασμός ή έστω μια εκτίμηση του συγγραφέα για τον πολιτικό, που όμως σε άλλα σημεία του βιβλίου αντικαθίσταται από σαρκασμό και την αίσθηση ότι είναι τραγικό ένας τέτοιος χαρακτήρας να είναι υπεύθυνος την εποχή του covid. Φυσικά, υπάρχει μια (μη) αποποίηση ευθύνης του συγγραφέα, όταν δηλώνει για τον Μπόρις ότι «Μπορεί, φυσικά, να φαίνεται οικείος σε ορισμένους αναγνώστες…». Ναι, μας φάνηκε! 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. John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Samuel Johnson Prize; Prix Médicis; Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; Costa Book Award

In a 2001 newspaper interview, Coe described himself as an atheist. [16] Honours and awards [ edit ] A further theme is the change in technology. The King’s speech on VE Day is listened to on the radio but subsequent events are watched on TV and the TVs of course improve over the years. It is the very conservative (and Conservative) Geoffrey who is surprisingly most interested in technology, for example having a personal computer before his sons.Full of vibrant characters and fabulous dialogue, which switches from laugh-out-loud funny to extremely poignant Independent Bournville is also a bit conveniently out of the way and behind at least the most cosmopolitan times: in 1966: "One hundred miles away London, apparently, is swinging. Bournville ? Not so much"; Coe does London well, too, but he's particularly good at capturing that -- as the title of a previous novel had it -- 'Middle England' (as well as, here, also out of the way Wales).) Bournville is a quiet village in the heart of England famous for its chocolate. For eleven-year-old Mary, it is the center of her world, the place where most of her family’s friends and neighbors have worked for decades and where the streets smell faintly of chocolate. Bournville is presented as A Novel in Seven Occasions, each of the seven sections set around a significant event that was the talk of the nation -- Great Britain -- at the time. Jonathan Coe is chronicler of contemporary events. It’s a style of writing from which he does not waver. If I was to be critical there’s a sense of his writing by numbers; If I'm being positive its apparent that the course of history is endlessly fascinating and so there is a pipeline of lived life for Coe to draw on.