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The
2003 Award
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The Rotters' Club by
Jonathan Coe
Nominated by:
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Publisher of Nominated Edition: Viking ISBN : 0670892521 |
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors. |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| Trotter,
Harding, Anderton and Chase: sounds like a legal conglomerate, according
to their wearily sarcastic English master. But in fact they are a quartet
of young friends at a Birmingham school. Sean Harding's anarchic humour
makes him a mythical figure, both among his fellow pupils and at the girls'
school next door. Doug Anderton begins to absorb the political lessons of
his father, a leading shop steward at British Leyland's Longbridge plant.
Philip Chase struggles to live with his parents' faltering marriage and
the collapse of his progressive rock band, whose career is shorter than
a Yes concept album. And for Benjamin Trotter, aspiring novelist, part-time
composer and closet Christian, life will never have any meaning until he
can find some way to make the beautiful Cicely sit up and take notice of
him.
Together, these friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine, and soon new arguments begin to rage: which is more worthy of the front page, the story of a bitter industrial dispute in far-off London, or the equally bitter sporting rivalry between the loathsome Culpepper and Steve Richards, the only black pupil in the entire school. The
Rotters' Club is a comedy of schoolchildren in crisis and adults in
trauma; a novel in which the personal and the political intersect suddenly
and without warning: a memoir of a long-lost era which shows that racism
and class warfare could be just as rife in a school common room as on
a car manufacturer's shop floor. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He has published five novels, The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up!, which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and The House of Sleep, which won the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award and the French Priz Médicis Étranger. |
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Find out more about the author on the following websites:
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