Product Description

Jonathan Coe's widely acclaimed novel is set in the 1970s against a distant backdrop of strikes, terrorist attacks and growing racial tension. A group of young friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine and begin to put their own distinctive spin onto events in the wider world. A zestful comedy of personal and social upheaval, The Rotters' Club captures a fateful moment in British politics - the collapse of 'Old Labour' - and imagines its impact on the topsy-turvy world of the bemused teenager: a world in which a lost pair of swimming trunks can be just as devastating as an IRA bomb.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77581 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
One of those sweeping, ambitious yet hugely readable, moving, richly comic novels that you find all too rarely in English fiction ... a masterpiece (Daily Telegraph )

About the Author
Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His most recent novel is The Rain Before It Falls. He is also the author of The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up!, which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The House of Sleep, which won the 1998 Prix Medicis Etranger, The Rotter's Club, winner of the Everyman Wodehouse Prize and The Closed Circle He has also published a biography of the novelist B.S. Johnson, which won the Orwell prize in 2005. He lives in London with his wife and two children.

Customer Reviews

a tale of growing up in the 1970's Midlands
The first part of this book read like the Golden Years, a description of childhood through rose-tinted spectacles that all of us could wear about growing up decades ago. But this part is brought to a close with cataclysmic events that bring to the story closer to current life. The book then develops depths that I hadn't expected initially, combining a dark humour with the tragedy that made this a more stimulating read. Some of the deep divisions in 1970's society and the collapsing hierarchy are seen through an adolescent's eyes, that tarnish the initial golden years.

This is a mixture of observation of family life combined with commentary on a particular period of British history. The book builds some surprises and tells the story well. The only serious flaw is the third part of the book, which is a stream-of-consciousness download of thoughts around the plot. This fails to add any relevant detail, and merely reflects on events form the fictional main character. This creates a painfully slow means to finish the book.

Serious, endearing and funny, but without the sentimentalist claptrap
A thoroughly captivating read that successfully marries 1970s real events - political and social - with a fictional coming of age story. It appals and delights with regular turns in plot, but crucially, always leaves you wishing you had more time to read the next chapter straight away.

As my first experience of Jonathan Coe I was enthralled by his wit and attention to detail. I am particularly pleased that none of the characters are overtly likeable, but the reader is left to enjoy the flow of watching events unfold. Often the reader is moved from third to first person narrative and at times it reads like a diary (indeed sometimes it is just that) or the thoughts in someone's head, whilst for the main part the story is told through narration.

A book of this nature is, inherently, a subjective story from the mind of the author so it is only a personal niggle that some loose ends are left untidy. I made my wife jump when I thumped the book down after the last page out of frustration; but I guess that just makes a great read. It's not often that I'm left with so many lasting impressions from a story set in the 1970s.

To say more would give away too much of the plot, but this has a worthy place on my recommendations list.

Don't believe all you read
I stumbled across this book by accident.

Having been born and raised in the area of South Birmingham where it is set, with a father working on the production line at Leyland and having commenced my career there as well as a Commercial student (after a Catholic Grammar School education) I hoped to find a lot to relate to - and I did.

I enjoyed the references to the area, the places and Birmingham life in the 70's as I was the same age as the characters with the same background.

Unfortunately the politically correct drivel that runs through the book was a complete turn off.

It was a fact that the unions were not run by "good people". They were using the workers as political cannon fodder. The union officials were often lazy, corrupt and bullies. Ordinary guys couldn't get a look in as Union reps. You had to adhere to "the cause" to be accepted.

People like my father never knew whether they would be working from one day to the next. Poverty was very real - not because wages were low, quite the opposite, but because workers were so often called out against their will and rents/mortgages fell behind, food/utility bills couldn't be met.

It was a nightmare. Eventually the workers did revolt against the unions - by walking out as it happens - during Red Robbo's time.

Unfortunately too late. Now the community is a shadow of its former self.

Thanks to Socialism.

It's easy to be a Socialist from behind a privileged writers desk.

The reality is much grimmer from the perspective of the poor working men and women who have had their livelyhoods, families, communities sacrificed on it's altar.


The nonsense about the attacks on Irish workers is also fabricated. Trouble was rare and, as is mostly the case, between individuals and rarely abour race. It did flare however the day after the Birmingham Pub Bombings when some Irish employees chose to come to work wearing IRA berets. The acts of those idiots did provoke the other workers and quite rightly so.