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The Closed Circle

The Closed Circle

‘As funny as anything Coe has written’ The Times Literary Supplement

Summary

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe, read by Nicholas Burns.

On Millennium night, with Blair presiding over a superficially cool, sexed-up new version of the country, Benjamin Trotter finds himself watching the celebrations on his parents' TV. Watching, in fact, his younger brother, Paul, now a bright young New Labour MP who has bought wholeheartedly into the Blairite dream. Neither of them can know that their lives are about to implode.

Set against the backdrop of a changing Britain and the country's increasingly compromised role in America's 'war against terrorism', the characters struggle to make sense of the perennial problems of love, vocation and family.

About the author

Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of 14 novels, which include The Accidental Woman, What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, The Rotters’ Club, The Rain Before It Falls, Expo 58, Middle England, Mr Wilder and Me and Bournville. He has won the Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Européen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, among many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work been translated into 22 languages. Suspended Moment, an album of his musical compositions recorded live in Italy, was released on the British Progressive Jazz label in 2023. Jonathan Coe lives in London.
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