Description
‘The premier satirist of great British crapness is on killer form in this gag-a-minute mystery’ Observer
‘A new Jonathan Coe is always a treat… Coe is a master at exploring the pains of modern life’ The Times
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Post-university life doesn’t suit Phyl. Time passes slowly, living with her parents and working a zero-hours contract at Heathrow Airport, while her budding plans of becoming a writer are going nowhere.
That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He’s been investigating a radical think tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that’s been scheming to push the British government in an ever more extreme direction. When he follows this story to a conference in a rambling old hotel deep in the Cotswolds, events take a bizarre and sinister turn. Soon he is caught up in a world of cryptic clues, secret passages and, eventually, murder.
In the end, despite the efforts of a suitably eccentric detective, it falls to Phyl herself – ably assisted by Chris’s outspoken adopted daughter Rashida – to look for answers to the fatal mystery. But will they lie in contemporary politics, or in a literary enigma that is almost forty years old?
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‘Full of energy… a madcap caper, a sideways memoir, a tricky jeu d’esprit that is also a quiet defence of fiction in a post-truth age, and enormous fun to read’ Guardian
‘Deeply pleasurable, and a lot of fun. You emerge from it glowing’ iPaper
‘Fantastic, wickedly funny and gripping. Coe has written a beautifully crafted mystery that dovetails as a sharp, smart, state of the nation’ Simon McCleave
‘I was delighted… it’s clever and political – while also being very funny’ John Self
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