The Rotters' Club

By Jonathan Coe

Subjects: England, fiction, Literature, Teenage boys, Friendship, fiction, Large type books, Male friendship, Fiction, historical, general, New York Times reviewed, Fiction, Nineteen seventies, Student newspapers and periodicals, School children

Description: Jonathan Coe's widely acclaimed 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 onto 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.