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Decadant Decades
To celebrate the paperback publication of Jonathan Coe's latest novel The Closed Circle we take a look at decade defining books. We have selected some definitive works evoking the last fifty years including the wonderful Breakfast at Tiffany's, the cult classic, On The Road, Nick Hornby's fantastic Fever Pitch and Jonathan Coe's acclaimed The Rotter's Club (prequel to The Closed Circle).
Click on the title to find out more about the book.
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The Rotter's Club
The novel is set in the 1970s against a distant backdrop of strikes, terrorist attacks and growing racial tension. A group of young friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine and begin to put their own distinctive spin on to events in the wider world. A zestful comedy of personal and social upheaval, The Rotters' Club captures a fateful moment in British politics - the collapse of 'Old Labour' - and imagines its impact on the topsy-turvy world of the bemused teenager: a world in which a lost pair of swimming trunks can be just as devastating as an IRA bomb.
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Fever Pitch
Chronicled from the perspective of a fanatical youngster, through disillusioned adolescence, to an adult "who should know better", the author - an Arsenal fan - examines the absurdities and traumas of everyday life and football. Combines anecdote with a wider commentary on the state of the game. |
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Breakfast at Tiffany's
It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail-hour to breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, Holly Golightly. Pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock department', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction.
This edition also contains three stories: 'House of Flowers', 'A Diamond Guitar' and 'A Christmas Memory'. |
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On the Road by Jack Kerouack
On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion. |
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Author interviews
