Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe rose to fame with his satirical take on society during the Blair years; now, he turns to the fragmented world of the Facebook era...

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Jonathan Coe was born in 1961 in Lickey, south-west Birmingham to a physicist and a music and PE teacher. He began writing at an early age, and recalls his first surviving story, a detective thriller called The Castle of Mystery, was written at the age of eight. (Pub quiz fans might also like to know that the first few pages of this story appear in What a Carve Up!.) He continued to write at school, and aged 15, sent his first full-length novel – entitled All The Way – to a publisher. A few years later, he admits being so embarrassed after re-reading it that he burnt it on a bonfire in his parents' back garden.

He attended King Edward's school in Birmingham, and went from there to Trinity College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge he wrote numerous short stories and another novel, The Sunset Bell. He then went on to Warwick University where he was awarded a doctorate for his thesis on Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. While working on this thesis he also completed The Accidental Woman, which became his first published novel on its’ release in 1987. He subsequently went on to teach English Poetry at Warwick before embarking on a varied career which included pursuing his musical ambitions and legal proofreading before becoming a freelance writer and journalist.

He moved to London in the late 1980s and wrote songs for – in his own words – “his short-lived band The Peer Group and an ever shorter-lived feminist cabaret group called Wanda and the Willy Warmers.” He found little musical success however, and resolved to concentrate on his writing, publishing A Touch of Love in 1989 and The Dwarves of Death in 1990. Following these novels’ warm reception, he embarked upon What a Carve-Up!, financing the writing of it with two short biographies of film stars: Humphrey Bogart: Take It and Like It (1991) and James Stewart: Leading Man (1994). What a Carve-Up! was completed in early 1993 and published by Penguin a year later. It became his first international success, with translations in sixteen languages, and was awarded the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1995.

This bestseller was followed by The House of Sleep (1997), which won the Prix Médicis Étranger; The Rotters' Club (2001), which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; The Closed Circle (2004) and The Rain Before It Falls (2007). Jonathan also spent these years researching and writing a biography of B S Johnson, the famous British experimental novelist of the 1960s. This biography, Like a Fiery Elephant, was published in 2004, and was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize.

He lives in London with his wife and two daughters (a situation he credits with helping him to successfully write women’s voices), and in 2004 he was made Chevalier l'Ordre des Arts and des Lettres. His ninth novel, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, was published in the UK in May 2010.

The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
Maxwell Sim seems to have hit rock bottom. Estranged from his father, newly divorced, unable to communicate with his only daughter, he realizes that while he may have seventy-four friends on Facebook, there is nobody in the world with whom he can actually share his problems. Then a business proposition comes his way - a strange exercise in corporate PR that will require him to spend a week driving from London to a remote retail outlet on the Shetland Isles. Setting out with an open mind, good intentions and a friendly voice on his SatNav for company, Maxwell finds that this journey soon takes a more serious turn, and carries him not only to the furthest point of the United Kingdom, but into some of the deepest and darkest corners of his own past. In his sparkling and hugely enjoyable new book Jonathan Coe reinvents the picaresque novel for our time.

Read more about The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim at Lovereading.co.uk