Synopses & Reviews
If Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie had ever managed to collaborate, they might have produced this shamelessly entertaining novel, which introduces readers to what may be the most powerful family in England and is certainly the vilest. A tour de force of menace, malicious comedy, and torrential social bile, this book marks the American debut of an extraordinary writer.
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"A spoof of classic mystery stories and silly British comedies, this novel is funny, trenchant and ingenious." The New Yorker
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"A comic/gothic delight....A hilarious novel....The only mystery left is why this gem is the first of this 34-year-old author's novels to reach America." Chicago Tribune
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"The Winshaw Legacy is a big, raucous and exhilarating novel." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
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"A wickedly breezy view of postwar Britain as typified by one greedy, ruthless, and mercifully imaginary English family." San Francisco Chronicle
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"[S]avage and majestic..." Charles Taylor, Salon.com
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"Superb...fiendishly clever...riveting...a nasty farce with lots of bathroom humor and violence which reminds me at least as much of Fawlty Towers as it does of Midnight's Children." Jay McInerney
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"[A] patchily entertaining postmodern pastiche of class warfare....A story closer to this mundane Britain of post-Thatcher disaffection would have been more welcome for his American debut than agitprop Waugh-mongering." Publishers Weekly
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"[A] remarkably complicated yet arresting novel....This complex, layered novel is demanding but rewarding; persistent readers will be completely engrossed." Booklist
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"[A] mordant satire of 1980s greed....Coe stirs elements of the Gothic, detective, and comic genres into a wildly funny, ultimately frightening mix. Though occasionally didactic, this work is nonetheless a tour-de-force-and a delight to read." Library Journal
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"A remarkable achievement; intelligent, funny, and important." The Times Literary Supplement
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"An extravagant literary blockbuster....A grand and intelligent novel, so full of accomplishment and pleasure." New Statesman & Society
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"Really, something to get excited about....[A] big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving treat of a novel." The Guardian (U.K.)
Synopsis
A postmodern detective story, a scathing send-up of the rapacious '80s, a macabre Gothic, this savagely funny, hugely inventive, and passionately political novel heralds the American debut of an exciting English author. As the biographer of a wildly eccentric family pieces together the truth of their sordid legacy, he finds they have a mysterious connection to his own troubled history.
About the Author
Born in Birmingham in 1961, Jonathan Coe took degrees from Cambridge and Warwick universities. His other novels include The Rotters' Club and The House of Sleep. He lives in London.