"Reflective and compelling, satirical and tender, wildly imaginative and painstakingly realistic." -Chris Lehmann,
The Washington Post Book World "The gritty, cross-pond equivalent to
Look Homeward, Angel. . . . The pangs of embarrassment, the anguish of uncertainty, the awkwardness of success [are] vividly present here." - Mike Francis,
The Oregonian "Funny and astute . . . The strength of
The Rotters' Club lies in its comic humanity." - Stephen Amidon,
The Atlantic Monthly
"Please, God . . . if there's a next life, let me write as well as Jonathan Coe.
The Rotters' Club offers a thick slice of seventies Birmingham-sharp, acerbic, and menacingly true; a sad, funny, thoroughly engaging look at compromise, complicity, and change in a decade many of us would choose to forget." -Anthony Bourdain, author of
Kitchen Confidential and
A Cook's Tour "Its tinder-dry combustion of comic, indignant and elegiac suggests an Evelyn Waugh of the left." -Richard Eder,
The New York Times Book Review
"A thrillingly traitorous work. It hums along for a hundred pages of wise comedy about teenage love's mortifications, then cold cocks us with an honest surprise as cruel as it is earned." -David Kipen,
San Francisco Chronicle "Jonathan Coe is a mesmerizing writer. . . .
The Rotters' Club is a wonderfully gripping novel, by turns funny, heartbreaking and terrifying." -
The Seattle Times
"The novel's many intricate parts manage to mesh and turn with the startling harmony you find in Robert Altman's movies." -Todd Pruzan,
The Village Voice
"If there's a contemporary novelist who combines sharp and sometimes savage social commentary with the classic, full-blooded pleasures novels are supposed to give readers as well as Jonathan Coe does, I must have missed him." -Charles Taylor, Salon.com
and from the UK . . .
"A must-read for anyone who cares about contemporary literature." -Katie Owen,
The Telegraph "Filled with characters whose destinies we care about, whose welfare moves us. This is the simplest but highest calling of literature." -William Sutcliffe,
The Independent on Sunday "As always with Jonathan Coe, the sheer intelligent good nature that suffuses his work makes it a pleasure to read." -Peter Bradshaw,
The Guardian
"As a study of adolescence, it is hard to beat. The aching naivety and intensity of the main characters made me think of Salinger." -John de Falbe,
The Spectator "Coe handles his complex approach to a complex era effortlessly, and the end product is a compulsive and gripping read." -Paul Connolly,
The Times "At once uproariously entertaining and deadly serious-a comedy of manners and mores, but also a conscientious and politically charged reminder of an age quite easily forgotten, yet not far removed from our own." -Henry Hitchings,
Times Literary Supplement "Like all of Coe's novels,
The Rotters' Club is brilliant, funny, apposite, informed and unflaggingly truth-seeking." -Rachel Cusk,
The Evening Standard "Superior entertainment. The pages seem to turn themselves." -Hugo Barnacle,
The New Statesman
Four teenage boys, friends and schoolmates, deal with the hopes, dreams, traumas, and challenges of adolescence as they come of age in industrial Birmingham, a British city that is confronting its own economic crisis, during the upheaval and change of the 1970s. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.