Bournville: From the bestselling author of Middle England

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A book of things blended together: comedy with tragedy, England's past with its present, and cocoa solids with vegetable fat . The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Educated in Edgbaston, one gathers from the epilogue that many of the locales featured in Bournville are/were familiar to him in his younger years.

The author has said in an interview that he his “heart sank” when he initially heard of Ian McEwen’s “Lessons” published just ahead of his own and covering a similar timespan and the interaction between national and personal events – before reading it and realising how different the two books are in style and approach. As there are large jumps in time between events, there are also big jumps in the family narrative such as partners, weddings and children. As we travel through 75 years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the Internet, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary's family - and their country - closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before? Covid και του Brexit, περνώντας από την ενθρόνιση της Ελισσάβετ, το Μουντιάλ της Αγγλίας του 1966, το χρίσμα του Καρόλου ως πρίγκιπα της Ουαλίας (κάποιοι διαμαρτυρήθηκαν ότι ο πρίγκιπας της Ουαλίας θα έπρεπε να είναι Ουαλός), ο γάμος Καρόλου-Νταίάνας, το θάνατο της πριγκίπισσας Νταιϊάνα και "τη μάχη της σοκολάτας" στο ευρωκοινοβούλιο και με αρκετό τρυφερό σαρκασμό για τον Μπόρις Τζόνσον. It follows four generations of a family in seven sections which cover some of the most famous events of the last 75 years including the coronation, a royal wedding and funeral, the 1966 World Cup and the covid pandemic.

Coe uses some big 20th century historical moments to situate and contextualise his vivid characters. She will have three sons and two of them will have children and THOSE children will have children and, in the meantime, things will inexorably change.

B ournville, we learn from Jonathan Coe’s notes at the end of the novel, is the fourth in a planned quintet he’s writing under the general title of Unrest. His writing is wonderful, his stories are clever and deep, and his left-wing politics are always spot on. Despite the 75-year time span and the large cast of characters, the book is eminently readable and defines characters through the events they lived through. This was a bit slow for me, jumping from time line to time line- a multi generational tale explored through seven events from VE Day through to Covid.

E qui Mary e la sua famiglia assistono ai grandi eventi e ai cambiamenti che il Regno Unito affronterà in quasi un secolo di storia.