Bournville: From the bestselling author of Middle England

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When one of Mary’s son’s starts dating a non-white girlfriend, his grandmother Doll is disquieted. “‘Do you treat her the same?’ Doll wanted to know. ‘I mean … do you treat her the same as you would any other girl?’” This striking line is an unsettling and plausible combination of compassion and racism.

There are a few good chapters, especially those talking about Cadbury's, but I was dismayed to read in the author notes that the death of Mary Lamb in the novel was an accurate account of the passing of Coe's own mother during the Covid pandemic. The other nationality that plays a role is the Welsh. The families visit Wales for a holiday and two of the cousins – Peter Lamb and David Foley – become friendly with Sioned, daughter of the owner of the farm where they are staying. That too ends badly when Sioned shows her bitterness (and that of her family) regarding the English treatment of the Welsh including the Investiture of the Prince of Wales and flooding Welsh villages for a reservoir for water for England. Welsh nationalism will appear again. There is much to enjoy here, as in all Coe's novels . . . an intelligent criticism of our shared history since 1945 Scotsman Writers have to believe their stories or they won't be able to write them well, or at all. It looks like Coe simply couldn't believe Bournville enough, so he hashed together some odds and ends he had already laying about, filled in the holes with some silicon and called it a novel. A compelling social history that's sprinkled throughout with Coe's inimitable humour, love and white-hot anger * Evening Standard *

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Bournville is also a bit conveniently out of the way and behind at least the most cosmopolitan times: in 1966: "One hundred miles away London, apparently, is swinging. Bournville ? Not so much"; Coe does London well, too, but he's particularly good at capturing that -- as the title of a previous novel had it -- 'Middle England' (as well as, here, also out of the way Wales).) Fielder, Jez; Alasdair Sandford; Isabel Silva (23 December 2019). "UK election: 'Getting Brexit done is going to take decades' says Jonathan Coe". Euronews . Retrieved 28 November 2021. In this affecting generational saga, framed by the pandemic and structured by seven milestone broadcasts, Jonathan Coe - known for his state-of-the-nation novels - once again takes the temperature of Britain * FT, Best Books of 2022 * I've only read one other Coe novel - Middle England - and from that limited experience it seems that Coe has a tried-and-tested formula: state of the nation novels focusing on a specific (or a number of specific) events in recent(ish) history, and a tight cast of characters who spend a fair chunk of the narrative ruminating on politics and current affairs in said moment in history.

Jonathan Coe FRSL ( / k oʊ/; born 19 August 1961) is an English novelist and writer. His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, What a Carve Up! (1994) reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name. It is set within the "carve up" of the UK's resources that was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s. He has written a short children's adaptation of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, and a children's story called The Broken Mirror. Both titles are published in Italy only, as La storia di Gulliver (2011) and Lo specchio dei desideri (2012). Coe has long been interested in both music and literature. In the mid-1980s he played with a band (The Peer Group) and tried to get a recording of his music. He also wrote songs and played keyboards for a short-lived feminist cabaret group, Wanda and the Willy Warmers. [2] He published his first novel, The Accidental Woman, in 1987. In 1994 his fourth novel What a Carve Up! won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. It was followed by The House of Sleep, which won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Best Novel award and, in France, the Prix Médicis. As of 2022, Coe has published fourteen novels. As the latest in J Coe's Unrest sequence, Bournville is one of the most warm-hearted, brilliant and beguiling of his State of the Nation novels. To show three generations of an ordinary Midlands family, their paths taken and not taken, their friends, lovers, jobs, achievements and losses; to interweave this with 75 years of national history - and to do so with such a lightness of touch is a tremendous achievement. All the absurdities of our nation wrapped up in something as bitter, sweet, and addictive as a bar of the best Bournville chocolate Amanda Craig, author of The Golden RuleIn 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. A tender portrayal of the state of the nation through the prism of family relationships Woman & Home Everything changes, and everything stays the same. That is the overriding mantra of John Coe’s latest book, which tells a nation’s story through generations of the same family. It’s ambitious, it’s clever, and it works! Mary grows up in Bournville, and while it is not the only significant locale in the novel -- from unavoidable London to several scenes set in Wales, the novel does more than just visit much of the UK -- it plays a prominent role, reflecting also changing Britain, with the house Mary grew up in in entirely new hands at the novel's end, and the Cadbury factory already becoming more tourist attraction -- with Cadbury World -- than chocolate-producing-center.