Bournville

by Jonathan Coe

Overview

A tender and wickedly funny portrait of England told through four generations of one family.

Bournville is a quiet village in the heart of England famous for its chocolate. For eleven-year-old Mary, it is the center of her world, the place where most of her family’s friends and neighbors have worked for decades and where the streets smell faintly of chocolate. 

During the next three-quarters of a century, Mary will have children and grandchildren and great-children. She will live through the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the 1966 World Cup final (the last time England won), royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, and Bournville itself will gradually disappear into the sprawl of the growing city of Birmingham.

As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the World Wide Web, 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?

Bournville is a rich and poignant new novel from the bestselling, Costa award-winning author of Middle England. It is the story of a woman, of a nation's love affair with chocolate, of Britain itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609459420
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/17/2023
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	203,436
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Coe was born in 1961 in Lickey, a suburb of south-west Birmingham. His first novel, The Accidental Woman was published in 1987. His best-selling novels include What a Carve Up! and The Rotters’ Club (2001). He is the recipient of many prizes and awards, including both Costa Novel of the Year and Prix du Livre Européen. He won France’s Prix Médicis for The House of Sleep and Italy’s Premio Flaiano and Premio Bauer-Ca’ Foscari.

Editorial Reviews

★ “Coe...deftly encapsulates 80 years of British history in this tender portrait of a woman, based on his mother, who lived through it all.”—Library Journal (starred)

“One family’s odyssey spotlights England’s transformation between VE Day and the coronavirus pandemic....Perfect for readers who appreciate thoughtful and substantive fiction.”—Kirkus Reviews

“With his third novel in four years, Coe is on a roll; he tracks the fortunes of a family through snapshots of communal experiences, from the Queen's coronation through the 1966 World Cup to pandemic lockdown, in a moving, compassionate portrait of individual and national change.”―The Guardian (UK), Best Fiction of 2022

“A compelling social history that's sprinkled throughout with Coe's inimitable humour, love and white-hot anger.”—Evening Standard (UK)

“A hugely impressive state-of-the-nation tale.”―The Observer (UK)

“This charming read is as warming, rich and comforting as a mug of hot chocolate.”―The Times (UK)

‘This is another eminently readable Coe, full of believable characters and fizzing dialogue. And it couldn't be more timely.”―Big Issue (UK)

“Told with compassion, steadiness, decency and always a glint in the eye, this is a novel that both challenges and delights. For anyone who has felt lost in the past six years, it is like meeting an ally.”—Rachel Joyce, author of Miss Benson’s Beetle

“Warm-hearted, brilliant and beguiling…To show three generations of an ordinary Midlands family, their paths taken and not taken, their friends, lovers, jobs, achievements and losses; to interweave this with 75 years of national history—and to do so with such a lightness of touch is a tremendous achievement. All the absurdities of our nation wrapped up in something as bitter, sweet, and addictive as a bar of the best Bournville chocolate.”—Amanda Craig, author of The Golden Rule

 

From the Publisher

★ 10/01/2023

The enlightened planners of Bournville, a model village on the outskirts of Birmingham, England, envisioned a place that would not only house the workers of the Cadbury chocolate company but also enrich their lives with parkland, gardens, and green spaces for exercise and good health. Mary Lamb, whose father works at Cadbury, makes her first appearance at age 11, sitting by the radio listening to the king and Winston Churchill proclaim VE Day. She is last seen in failing health, struggling to connect with family on Skype during COVID isolation. In the years between, Mary works as a music teacher and raises three sons with a narrow-minded husband whose racist and homophobic attitudes don't soften over time. VERDICT Bookended by the events of March 2020, when the world went into pandemic lockdown, the novel lands lightly on the major happenings of British life, from the queen's coronation to Diana's funeral and the 75th anniversary of VE Day. Coe (Middle England) deftly encapsulates 80 years of British history in this tender portrait of a woman, based on his mother, who lived through it all.—Barbara Love

Library Journal

2023-07-26
One family’s odyssey spotlights England’s transformation between VE Day and the coronavirus pandemic.

Just south of grimy industrial Birmingham, Bournville was established in the late 19th century by the Cadbury family as a model village with healthy housing and amenities for the workers in their chocolate factory. It’s there in 1945 that 11-year-old Mary joins a celebration of the European war’s end that introduces her to her future husband—and to the bigoted nationalism that will contend into the next century with a more expansive view of Britain’s future. In 1953, she becomes engaged to stodgy, conservative Geoffrey Lamb around the time of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation; it’s the second in a series of iconic events on which Coe hangs his exploration of intermingled societal and personal change. By the time of the England-West Germany World Cup final in 1966, the Lambs have three sons with very different personalities and outlooks. Eldest Jack has Mary’s outgoing nature but shares Geoffrey’s values; by the end of the novel, he’s a Brexit supporter and admirer of Boris Johnson. (Johnson flits around the fringes of the story, seen first as a joke and then revealed to be a shrewd manipulator of social anxieties.) Quiet, deliberate Martin—married to a Black woman, to Geoffrey’s open dismay—works for Cadbury; his efforts to get English chocolate certified for sale in the European Union provide a hilarious scene of E.U. dysfunction. Youngest son Peter, a musician, finally acknowledges that he's gay during the period of turbulent emotionalism surrounding the death of Princess Diana, an episode of national hysteria that most of the Lamb family (except Jack, of course) regard with bemusement. As Coe follows his richly characterized cast across 75 years, he hews to the venerable traditions of the English realistic novel, capturing Britain’s increasingly diverse, cosmopolitan society in the varying reactions of his characters. The pandemic-restricted commemorations of VE Day’s 75th anniversary bring this pensive novel to an appropriately sober close.

Perfect for readers who appreciate thoughtful and substantive fiction.

Kirkus Reviews