The Rotters' Club: 'One of those sweeping, ambitious yet hugely readable, moving, richly comic novels' Daily Telegraph

Description

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.

Jonathan Coe is the author of thirteen novels, all published by Penguin, which include the highly acclaimed bestsellers What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, The Rotters' Club, Number 11 and Middle England, which won the Costa Novel of the Year Award and the Prix du Livre Europeen. He is also the author of a biography of B.S Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, and The Broken Mirror, a children's book.

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 *