What a Carve Up!: ‘Everything a novel ought to be: courageous, challenging, funny, sad’ The Times

Jonathan Coe

May 2008 · Penguin UK

About this ebook

A wickedly funny take on life under the Thatcher government by the prize-winning author of Middle England.

It is the 1980s and the Winshaw family are getting richer and crueller by the year:

Newspaper-columnist Hilary gets thousands for telling it like it isn't. Henry's turning hospitals into car parks. Roddy's selling art in return for sex. Down on the farm Dorothy's squeezing every last pound from her livestock. Thomas is making a killing on the stock exchange; and Mark is selling arms to dictators.

But once their hapless biographer Michael Owen starts investigating the family's trail of greed, corruption and immoral doings, the time growing ripe for the Winshaws to receive their comeuppance . . .
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'A sustained feat of humour, suspense and polemic, full of twists and ironies' Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times

'A riveting social satire on the chattering and all-powerful upper classes' Time Out

'Big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving' Guardian

Written with his signature wit, Jonathan Coe's unmissable new novel, Bournville, is available now!

Ratings and reviews

I can't really tell you why, but it's important that you hate most of the characters in this novel. And I think the author had made sure that you will hate every one of them at least as much as the last one.

Takes you through the political turmoil of the 1980s and brings home the enormity and greed of it all. Brilliant!

As a 50 something I clearly remember the Thatcher years. They serve as the main backdrop to this story which added something for me. Loved the book and recommend it.

About the author

Jonathan Coe was born a few miles from Bournville in 1961. The author of political satires such as What a Carve Up! and Number 11, and family sagas such as The Rotters' Club and The Rain Before It Falls, his novels have won prizes at home and abroad, including Costa Novel of the Year and the Prix du Livre Européen (both for Middle England).