The Guardian has a new interview with Jonathan Coe, which just gives me an excuse to once again plug one of my favourite writers and urge anyone who hasn't picked him up to give him a try (he's working on a new novel - hooray - and promises it will be comic). A good place to start is with The Rotters's Club and then follow-up with its sequel, The Closed 
Circle. This will give you the full scope of his brilliant talents for satire and his unique mix of comedy and tragedy. His last novel The Rain Before It Falls was very different to his usual style, but extraordinarily beautiful in its rendering of the complicated relationships between a group of female characters over several decades. I still haven't found the time yet to read Like a Fiery Elephant, his biography of the experimental writer B.S. Johnson, which won the Samuel Johnson award for non-fiction. But its success surely has led to the recent re-issue of one of Johnson's most interesting works, The Unfortunates, in which the chapters of the book are presented loose in a box, so they can be read in any order. It comes with an introduction by.... Jonathan Coe, of course.
Circle. This will give you the full scope of his brilliant talents for satire and his unique mix of comedy and tragedy. His last novel The Rain Before It Falls was very different to his usual style, but extraordinarily beautiful in its rendering of the complicated relationships between a group of female characters over several decades. I still haven't found the time yet to read Like a Fiery Elephant, his biography of the experimental writer B.S. Johnson, which won the Samuel Johnson award for non-fiction. But its success surely has led to the recent re-issue of one of Johnson's most interesting works, The Unfortunates, in which the chapters of the book are presented loose in a box, so they can be read in any order. It comes with an introduction by.... Jonathan Coe, of course.
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