Jonathan Coe

This November, we are delighted to welcome Jonathan Coe to the Bookshop, for an evening dedicated to his latest book. Bournville is a thought-provoking commentary of Britain, explored from the perspective of four generations of a single family.

Jonathan Coe was born outside Bournville in 1961 and is an award-winning author of several bestselling novels, including: The Rotters' Club, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing Best Novel award; The Closed Circle, which was nominated for Best Novel at the
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards, and; Middle England, which was Costa Novel of the Year in 2019.

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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.

As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the World Wide Web, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary's family - and their country - closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before?