Bournville

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Middle England comes a profoundly moving, brutally funny and brilliantly true portrait of Britain told through four generations of one family 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? ''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

About the author

Jonathan Coe

Product details

• Authors: Jonathan Coe, Coe Jonathan
• Publisher: Viking
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 07.09.2023
• EAN: 9780241517406
• ISBN: 978-0-241-51740-6
• No. of pages: 353
• Dimensions: 128 mm x 196 mm x 21 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Second World War fiction, FICTION / Historical / World War II, FICTION / Political, United Kingdom, Great Britain, Later 20th century c 1950 to c 1999, c 1938 to c 1946 (World War Two period), Modern and contemporary fiction, c 1939 to c 1945 (including WW2), Early 21st century c 2000 to c 2050