Number 11

November 7, 2016
In this sequel to The Winshaw Legacy, two childhood friends, Rachel and Alison, struggle to maintain their friendship and come of age in an England overrun with the alienating forces of modernity: austerity, social media, and capitalism run amok. The book’s point of view is widely, admirably panoramic, detailing Rachel’s early obsession with the death of David Kelly, Alison’s mother’s stint on a Survivor-style reality show, and an Oxford professor’s search for a long-lost German film reel, as well as the travails of two ideologically mismatched detectives, a bloviating right-wing columnist, and a Romanian dog walker who may or may not transform into a giant spider. Rachel is later employed as a tutor for the children of a tax-dodging billionaire, Sir Gilbert Gunn, whose mammoth home expansion includes the excavation and construction of an 11-story basement. The disparate plots draw near one another but never fully meet in action or in theme; nevertheless, this is still an entertaining satire.

Starred review from October 15, 2016
The political and cultural state of contemporary Britain is dissected in this multistrand novel.Coe's book is a sequel to The Winshaw Legacy (1995), a deadly serious satirical tale in which Thatcherism paid for its crimes through the merciless and meticulous dispatch of a family of right-wing upper-class monsters. Revenge is meted out here as well, in a much more fantastical way. The anchors of the story are two women, friends, whom we follow from girlhood, where they meet at a private school, to adulthood, where their lives have diverged. Rachel, who goes on to become the nanny to a horrendous upper-class family which embodies the greed of the new gilded age, is as a child obsessed with the suicide of U.N. weapons inspector David Kelly near the beginning of the Iraq War. Rachel's friend Alison watches her once briefly famous mother humiliate herself to get back into the spotlight. The misunderstanding that separates the two for many years can be read as a pithy comment on how we now accept the alienation technology has brought into our lives. The other strands of the story--involving a faded pop star, an academic whose dead husband was obsessed with tracking down an obscure German film, and the surviving tentacles of the Winshaw clan--add up to a picture of the U.K. from the time Tony Blair pulled the country into the Iraq War to the present day and its legacy from Thatcher: the rich in a state of permanent ascendancy and the social contract shredded by engineered ruthlessness which leaves Britons in a continual state of want or, in the case of those who can't afford live-saving medicine, dead. The tone is not so much anger as a state of settled disgust at the death of shame. Sections on the squalor of reality TV and the mob mentality the internet has brought about are particularly lethal. The denouement plays like Creature Feature by way of the Old Testament. This powerful and enthralling novel takes the measure of a society feeding on its members as little contemporary fiction has.

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November 15, 2016
Celebrated British satirist Coe's (Expo 58, 2014) rollicking eleventh novel, a (sort of) sequel to his comic masterpiece, The Winshaw Legacy (1995), consists of five interconnected stories, each a clever pastiche of a different genre. The first set piece introduces Rachel Wells, a 10-year-old spending the summer with her grandparents in the English countryside just after Tony Blair sanctioned the invasion of Iraq, and told in the manner of a classic gothic tale, complete with an ivy-covered dilapidated house, a mysterious madwoman, a corpse, and the vivid imagination of our young narrator. Subsequent pieces, following Rachel and those in her orbit over the next dozen years or so, employ similar literary gamesmanship, playing with tropes derived from farcical tales, detective novels, and B movies, all in service to the wickedly funny skewering of austerity-era English society. Coe's meta-awareness and knowing winks invite the reader to play along in this allusion-rich (from Jonathan Swift to Radiohead), thoroughly enjoyable balm to the current political climate. For fans of Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2016

The author of acidulous social satire that's won multiple awards (e.g., the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Coe offers a sequel to 1995's The Winshaw Legacy that leaves us unnerved about modern society as it scans the life of young Rachel from childhood to university days.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 15, 2016

The number 11 figures ominously in each strand of this craftily plotted novel. It begins as the address of a mysterious house in the woods where two girls track down a local known as the Mad Bird Woman. The two friends, Rachel and Alison, reappear throughout, although their paths diverge when a social media misunderstanding comes between them. Eleven again crops up significantly on a film canister containing an obscure old TV film, as the bus route that Alison travels to university in Leeds, and as the banquet table at which a potential murderer lies in wait for his victim. Also appearing at regular intervals in the story are members of the obscenely wealthy Winshaw family, last seen in Coe's 1995 novel, The Winshaw Legacy, whose excessive greed and corruption adversely affect most of this book's characters. VERDICT Coe succeeds in bringing together the many threads woven through this darkly comic novel with political and economic undercurrents and one big, hairy spider. A very pleasurable read. [See Prepub Alert, 7/25/16.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2016

The number 11 figures ominously in each strand of this craftily plotted novel. It begins as the address of a mysterious house in the woods where two girls track down a local known as the Mad Bird Woman. The two friends, Rachel and Alison, reappear throughout, although their paths diverge when a social media misunderstanding comes between them. Eleven again crops up significantly on a film canister containing an obscure old TV film, as the bus route that Alison travels to university in Leeds, and as the banquet table at which a potential murderer lies in wait for his victim. Also appearing at regular intervals in the story are members of the obscenely wealthy Winshaw family, last seen in Coe's 1995 novel, The Winshaw Legacy, whose excessive greed and corruption adversely affect most of this book's characters. VERDICT Coe succeeds in bringing together the many threads woven through this darkly comic novel with political and economic undercurrents and one big, hairy spider. A very pleasurable read. [See Prepub Alert, 7/25/16.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.