We've rounded up 20 great books we think everyone should read by 50

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Reading lists

20 books everyone should read in their fifties

With the dawn of a new millennium about to break, the Nineties was a strange, floating decade of positivity, hope and something called the World Wide Web. 

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Books that defined the 1990s

The Rain Before it Falls

A heartbreaking novel of family secrets from one of the masters of modern fiction, The Rain Before it Falls is part of our Penguin Essentials series which spotlights the very best of our modern classics 
 
Deeply moving and compelling, The Rain Before it Falls is the story of three generations of one family riven by tragedy. When Rosamund, a reluctant bearer of family secrets, dies suddenly, a mystery is left for her niece Gill to unravel. Some photograph albums and tapes point towards a blind girl named Imogen whom no one has seen in twenty years. The search for Imogen and the truth of her inheritance becomes a shocking story of mothers and daughters and of how sadness, like a musical refrain, may haunt us down the years. 
 
'A sad, often very moving story of mothers and daughters' Guardian 
 
'Entirely compelling...the plot will keep you rapt...reminiscent of Ian McEwan at his most effective' New Statesman 
 
Written with his signature wit, Jonathan Coe's unmissable new novel, The Proof of My Innocence, is available to order now!

Spectacular, heartbreaking, beautifully written. Rosamund's story is one of the most extraordinary and compelling you will ever read. Impossible to put down, I loved every minute of it

Entirely compelling . . . the plot will keep you rapt . . . reminiscent of Ian McEwan at his most effective

A sad, often very moving story of mothers and daughters

A hauntingly melancholy tale of love and loss...a moving exploration of the inheritance of unhappiness, and the devestating consequences it can have for future generations

Potent and melancholy, like a short, sad song

A male writer who can enter such traditionally female territory and aquit himself with such aplomb

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of 14 novels: The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, The Rotters’ Club, The Closed Circle, The Rain Before It Falls, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, Expo 58, Number 11, Middle England, Mr Wilder and Me and Bournville. He has won the Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Européen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, amongst many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre de l'Art et des Lettres. His work been translated into 22 languages. Jonathan Coe lives in London.

'What I want you to have, Imogen, above all, is a sense of your own history; a sense of where you come from, and of the forces that made you.' 
 
Rosamund lies dying in her remote Shropshire home. But before she does so, she has one last task: to put on tape not just her own story but the story of the young blind girl, her cousin's granddaughter, who turned up mysteriously at her party all those years ago. This is a story of generations, of the relationships within a family - and of what goes to make a child.

Mr Wilder and Me

The prize-winning, bestselling author of Middle England turns his gaze to one of cinema's most intriguing figures - famed director of Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder. 
 
***SOON TO BE A MAJOR FILM*** 
 
 In the summer of 1977, naïve Calista Frangopoulou sets out to venture into the world. On a Greek island that has been turned into a film set, she finds herself working for Billy Wilder, about whom she knows almost nothing. 
 
 While Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself is living with the realisation that his star may be on the wane. Rebuffed by Hollywood, he has financed his film with German money, and when Calista follows him to Munich, she finds herself joining him on a journey of memory into the dark heart of his family history. 
 
At once a tender coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of a Hollywood icon, Mr Wilder and Me explores the nature of time and fame, of family and the treacherous lure of nostalgia . . . 
__________ 
 
 'Utterly charming, deeply poignant and ultimately uplifting' Mail on Sunday 
 
'Sweeps beautifully from Hollywood to Greece and London' FT, Best Books of 2020 
 
'The dialogue's sharp, the comic timing excellent' Sunday Times 
 
Written with his signature wit, Jonathan Coe's unmissable new novel, The Proof of My Innocence, is available to order now!

A satisfyingly sweeping novel that still manages to push the form in new directions. As good as anything he's written - a novel to cherish

Effortlessly pleasurable and deceptively simple. Mr Wilder &amp; Me doesn't lack resonance, yet stays light on its feet. The whole book feels like some marvellous party where you ricochet from one good conversation to another

A coming of age story which offers a fascinating insight into fame - and the perils of an industry in flux

One of my favourite writers . . . a thoughtful tender read

An insightful and moving story about how memories can or cannot be passed down through the generations

A young woman named Calista meets the famed Hollywood director Billy Wilder in the sweltering summer of 1976. She knows nothing about him or his work, but this chance encounter will change her life for good. But while Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself - struggling to raise the money for his next feature film - is living with the realisation that his star may be on the wane. 
 
In his new novel that is, by turns, funny, tender and profoundly truthful, Jonathan Coe turns his gaze to the nature of time, fame, family and nostalgia. When the world is catapulting towards change, do you hold on for dear life or decide it's time to let go?

Winner of the Costa Novel Award 2019

Middle England

WINNER OF THE THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD 2019 
 
'The book everyone is talking about' The Times 
 
 'A comedy for our times' Guardian 
 __________________ 
 
 The country is changing and, up and down the land, cracks are appearing - within families and between generations. 
 
In the Midlands Benjamin Trotter is trying to help his aged father navigate a Britain that seems to have forgotten he exists, whilst in London his friend Doug doesn't understand why his teenage daughter is eternally enraged. Meanwhile, newlyweds Sophie and Ian can find nothing to agree on except the fact that their marriage is on the rocks . . . 
 
A hilarious follow-up to The Rotters' Club and Closed Circle, Jonathan Coe captures the state of our nation once again! 
 __________________ 
 
 'Coe's back with a bang. Middle England is the novel about Brexit we need' Daily Telegraph 
 
 'A pertinent, entertaining study of a nation in crisis' Financial Times, Books of the Year 
 
 'Very funny. Coe - a writer of uncommon decency - reminds us that the way out of this mess is through moderation, through compromise, through that age-old English ability to laugh at ourselves' Observer 
 
Written with his signature wit, Jonathan Coe's unmissable new novel, The Proof of My Innocence, is available to pre-order now!

Brilliantly funny . . . a compelling state of the nation novel, full of light and shade, which vividly charts modern Britain's tragicomic slide

Expansive and often very funny . . . Coe - a writer of uncommon decency - reminds us that the way out of this mess is through moderation, through compromise, through that age-old English ability to laugh at ourselves

A pertinent, entertaining study of a nation in crisis

His affectionately witty attitude to our human foibles is always uplifting . . . Superb

In Middle England, Coe shows an understanding of this country that goes beyond what most cabinet ministers can muster . . . he subtly builds a picture that exposes the cracks in society . . . he is a master of satire but pokes fun subtly, without ever being cruel, biting or blatant . . . his light, funny writing makes you feel better

Tackling his characters' opposing points of view, he draws a portrait of a recognisable Britain baffled by its loss of industry and jobs, and of everyday people shocked by a rise of acceptable racism and xenophobia. It's also very, very funny

Millions of words have been and will be written on Brexit but few will get to the heart of why it is happening as incisively as Middle England

This is a picture of England that comes from a place of compassion and understanding

Coe is as funny and tender as ever, restoring some humanity to the tumultuous societal backdrop

Middle England combines top-class soap opera storytelling with melancholy insight into what it means to be English

Middle England takes all that is memorable and moving about Coe's body of work and throws it at the present emergency

Sparkled with all the acuity of his best novels . . . Uproarious and always on-the-money

Very funny . . . Exceptionally good . . . Delightful

Middle England is a full-blooded state of the nation novel, and it brings us bang up-to-date

Coe is an extraordinarily deft plotter . . . he tackles big ambitious themes, in this case the effect of politics on people's lives, and political opinions on personal relations

The beauty of Jonathan Coe's new novel, Middle England, is the way it tracks the seemingly unconnected moments that brought Britain to its knees - and with devastating delicacy, too

The great chronicler of Englishness

Coe's comic critique of a divided country dazzles . . . properly laugh-out-loud funny . . . it is also incisive and brilliant about our divided country and the deep chasms revealed by the vote to leave. Do not miss

This book is sublimely good. State of the (Brexit) nation novel to end them all, but also funny, tender, generous, so human and intelligent about age and love as well as politics

Jonathan Coe's Middle England is brilliantly insightful on the times we are living in

Let me add to the chorus of praise for Jonathan Coe's new book Middle England. Easily my favourite of his since What a Carve Up! Which did for Thatcherism what Middle England does for Brexit

An astute, enlightened and enlightening journey into the heart of our current national identity crisis. Both moving and funny. As we'd expect from Coe

From post-industrial Birmingham to the London riots and the current political gridlock, it takes in family, literature and love in a comedy for our times

Coe can make you smile, sigh, laugh; he has abundant sympathy for his characters

This book is sublimely good. State of the (Brexit) nation novel to end them all, but also funny, tender, generous, so human and intelligent about age and love as well as politics

Beginning eight years ago on the outskirts of Birmingham, where car factories have been replaced by Poundland, and London, where frenzied riots give way to Olympic fever, Middle England follows a brilliantly vivid cast of characters through a time of immense change. 
 
There are newlyweds Ian and Sophie, who disagree about the future of the country and, possibly, the future of their relationship; Doug, the political commentator who writes impassioned columns about austerity from his Chelsea townhouse, and his radical teenage daughter who will stop at nothing in her quest for social justice; Benjamin Trotter, who embarks on an apparently doomed new career in middle age, and his father Colin, whose last wish is to vote in the European referendum. And within all these lives is the story of modern England: a story of nostalgia and delusion; of bewilderment and barely-suppressed rage. 
 
Following in the footsteps of The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle, Jonathan Coe's new novel is the novel for our strange new times.

The Rotters' Club

'Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life . . .' 
 
Coming of age in 1970s' Birmingham, teenager Benjamin Trotter is about to discover the agonies and ecstasies of growing up. Whether it is first love or last rites, IRA bombs or industrial strife, prog versus punk rock, expectations of bad poetry or an unexpected life-changing experience involving lost swimming trunks, The Rotters' Club is a heartfelt and hilarious portrait of a particular time and place featuring characters recognisable the world over . . . 
 
'Very funny, a compulsive and gripping read' The Times 
 
'Hugely entertaining' The Observer 
 
 'A book to cherish, a book to reread, a book to buy for all your friends' Independent on Sunday 
 
Jonathan Coe's latest novel The Proof of My Innocence is available to pre-order now!

One of those sweeping, ambitious yet hugely readable, moving and richly comic novels that you find all too rarely in English fiction ... a masterpiece

Very funny ... a compulsive and gripping read. Coe has achieved that rare feat: a novel stuffed with characters you really care for

A book to cherish, a book to reread, a book to buy for all your friends

Unforgettably funny and painfully honest, Jonathan Coe's tale of Benjamin Trotter and his friends' coming of age during the 1970s is a heartfelt celebration of the joys and agonies of growing up. 
 
Featuring, among other things, IRA bombs, prog rock, punk rock, bad poetry, first love, love on the side, prefects, detention, a few bottles of Blue Nun, lots of brown wallpaper, industrial strife, and divine intervention in the form of a pair of swimming trunks. 
 
Set against the backdrop of the decade's class struggles, tragic and riotous by turns, packed with thwarted romance and furtive sex, The Rotters' Club is for anyone who ever experienced adolescence the hard way.

‘Everything a novel ought to be: courageous, challenging, funny, sad’ The Times

What a Carve Up!

The hilarious 1980s political satire by Jonathan Coe, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 
 
It is the 1980s and the Winshaw family are getting richer and crueller by the year: 
 
Newspaper-columnist Hilary gets thousands for telling it like it isn't; Henry's turning hospitals into car parks; Roddy's selling art in return for sex; down on the farm Dorothy's squeezing every last pound from her livestock; Thomas is making a killing on the stock exchange; and Mark is selling arms to dictators. 
 
But once their hapless biographer Michael Owen starts investigating the family's trail of greed, corruption and immoral doings, the time growing ripe for the Winshaws to receive their comeuppance. . . 
 
This wickedly funny take on life under the Thatcher government was the winner of the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 
 
 
'A sustained feat of humour, suspense and polemic, full of twists and ironies' Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times 
 
'A riveting social satire on the chattering and all-powerful upper classes' Time Out 
 
'Big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving' Guardian 
 
Written with his signature wit, Jonathan Coe's unmissable new novel, The Proof of My Innocence is available to pre-order now!

A sustained feat of humour, suspense and polemic, full of twists and ironies

A brilliant noir farce, a dystopian vision and the story of an obsession. Michael is a lonely, rather pathetic writer, obsessed by the film, 'What A Carve Up!' in which a mad knifeman cuts his way through the inhabitants of a decrepit stately pile as the thunder rages. 
 
Inexplicably, Michael is commissioned to write the family history of the Winshaws, an upper class Yorkshire clan whose members have a finger in every establishment pie. But as a murderous maniac stalks the family, Michael realizes that his favourite film is coming true.

Number 11

This is a novel about the hundreds of tiny connections between the public and private worlds and how they affect us all. 
 
 
It's about the legacy of war and the end of innocence. 
 
 
It's about how comedy and politics are battling it out and comedy might have won. 
 
 
It's about how 140 characters can make fools of us all. 
 
 
It's about living in a city where bankers need cinemas in their basements and others need food banks down the street. 
 
 
It is Jonathan Coe doing what he does best ­- showing us how we live now. 
 
 
'Coe is among the handful of novelists who can tell us something about the temper of our times' Observer 
 
Written with his signature wit, Jonathan Coe's unmissable new novel, The Proof of My Innocence, is available to order now!

Coe is back doing what he does best. Number 11 is a baroquely plotted, densely allusive, heart-on-his-sleeve, state-of-the-nation satire, an angry and exuberant book....Coe is not just back, but back on top form

You can't stop reading....I was haunted for days

Coe's prose is always a delight...hugely enjoyable

Jonathan Coe has established himself as one of the most entertaining chroniclers of our times. . . He has an enviable lightness of touch and is brilliant at portraying the lunacy of our time, when bankers need iceberg houses and their neighbours need food banks. He is often satirical, always compassionate.

He brings us the usual high quotient of jokes, emotional engagement with the characters and commitment to old-school storytelling, complete with narrative twists and thrilling set pieces

An incredibly Dickensian novel...it articulates all kinds of themes that will make the reader feel very angry...I enjoyed it hugely and read it pretty much in a single sitting. Whenever there was an interruption I felt really angry and you can't really ask more from a novel than that...Really satisfying

Jonathan Coe rips into modern celebrity culture and the decadent lives of the super-rich in hs latest satire

A restlessness would overtake me when I was separated from the book

No modern novelist is better at charting the precariousness of middle-class life

Coe creeps up stealthily, delivering a book bursting with narrative coups and delicious ironies. Presenting a picture of an ailing country close to collapse, despite the apparent health suggested by its millionaires' mansions and its confidently callous politicians, the book scares rather than laughs us into calling for reform

Coe intriguingly depicts the social grievances of modern Britain

My first Jonathan Coe book but it won't be the last...gloriously insane...It takes you into another space and time....Very beautiful

It's dispiriting that, for a country that prides itself on its sense of humour, Coe has not been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.....Read Number 11 to see what an odd country Britain has become

[Coe] has a fine ear for dialogue and mastery of comic plot: this is first-class entertainment

The country needs Number 11....[Coe's] take-down of modern Britain proves he's still the UK's premiere national lampoon

Number 11 is undoubtedly a political novel. It is also an interrogation of the purposes and efficacy of humour in exposing society's ills

A richly enjoyable, densely textured and thought-provoking entertainment, Number 11 might not feature in many Kensington mansions, Swiss bolt-holes or private jets this winter. But perhaps it should'

What Victorians called "a condition of England" novel...This sequel is a very good book indeed - let's hope that Coe goes for a trilogy

Undoubtedly a political novel. It is also an interrogation of the purposes and efficacy of humour in exposing society's ills

Jonathan Coe has taken aim at the absurdity of modern life

This is a novel about the hundreds of tiny connections between the public and private worlds and how they affect us all. 
 
It's about the legacy of war and the end of innocence. 
 
It's about how comedy and politics are battling it out and comedy might have won. 
 
It's about how 140 characters can make fools of us all. 
 
It's about living in a city where bankers need cinemas in their basements and others need food banks down the street. 
 
It is Jonathan Coe doing what he does best &shy;- showing us how we live now.

Jonathan Coe

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 way Coe starkly captures the paranoia and fear of the early days of the pandemic is impressive and he has written what he calls a "faithful account" of the death of his mother during lockdown. It makes an intensely affecting finale to a fine novel.

Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state of the nation novel: Jonathan Coe is one of them

Coe's interwoven paeans to the lives of those rooted in the very centre of the UK - The Rotter's Club and Middle England among them - blend comedy, tragedy and social commentary in enjoyably memorable fashion, and his latest, Bournville, is no exception . . . Coe's particular gift is to understand how nostalgia, regret and an apprehension of what the future will bring might make us more, not less, empathetic to the frailties of those around us

In this affecting generational saga, framed by the pandemic and structured by seven milestone broadcasts, Jonathan Coe - known for his state-of-the-nation novels - once again takes the temperature of Britain

At heart Bournville is a novel designed to make you think by making you laugh, and the seriousness of the subject matter is tempered throughout by the author's piercing eye for the more ludicrous elements of human nature

A compelling social history that's sprinkled throughout with Coe's inimitable humour, love and white-hot anger

A hugely impressive state-of-the-nation tale

British novelists love to diagnose the state of the nation. Few do it better than Jonathan Coe, who writes with warmth and subversive glee about social change and the comforting mundanities it imperils

This charming read is as warming, rich and comforting as a mug of hot chocolate

This is another eminently readable Coe, full of believable characters and fizzing dialogue. And it couldn't be more timely

Coe has the great gift of combining engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft

Set in Coe's native 
Midlands and told through the 
lives of four generations of one 
family, beginning with 11-year-old 
Mary in 1945, Bournville is a 
poignant, clever and witty portrait 
of social change and how the 
British see themselves.

Bournville is Jonathan Coe's most ambitious novel yet . . . a novel about people and place. Entertaining and often poignant, it presents a captivating portrait of how Britons lived then and the way they live now

A book of things blended together: comedy with tragedy, England's past with its present, and cocoa solids with vegetable fat . . . the best fictional portrayal of lockdown that I've read

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

Coe is an eminently readable novelist

Full of vibrant characters and fabulous dialogue, which switches from laugh-out-loud funny to extremely poignant

The changing face of postwar Britain is brilliantly captured

As the latest in J Coe's Unrest sequence, Bournville is one of the most warm-hearted, brilliant and beguiling of his State of the Nation novels. 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

Affectionate, full of good humour, and often moving, this is Coe at his best.

For all the novel's satirical tang and historical sweep, it's at root a tender portrait of apparently simple folk trying to fathom the mystery of their own personalities

A tender portrayal of the state of the nation through the prism of family relationships

There is much to enjoy here, as in all Coe's novels . . . an intelligent criticism of our shared history since 1945

[Coe] has a huge talent for balancing humour with poignancy

In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For eleven-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it's the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades. 
 
Mary will go on to live through seventy-five years of social change, from the Coronation and the World Cup final, to royal weddings, royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. She'll have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, as modern life and the city crowd in on their peaceful enclave. Will these changing times bring Mary's family - and their country - closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before?

Jonathan Coe

Praise for Bournville

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, ...

The way Coe starkly captures the paranoia and fear of the early days of the pandemic is impressive and he has written what he calls a "faithful account" of the death of his mother during lockdown. It makes ...

Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state of the nation novel: Jonathan Coe is one of them

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, ...

The way Coe starkly captures the paranoia and fear of the early days of the pandemic is impressive and he has written what he calls a "faithful account" of the death of his mother during lockdown. It makes ...

Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state of the nation novel: Jonathan Coe is one of them

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, ...

The way Coe starkly captures the paranoia and fear of the early days of the pandemic is impressive and he has written what he calls a "faithful account" of the death of his mother during lockdown. It makes ...

Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state of the nation novel: Jonathan Coe is one of them

Books by Jonathan Coe

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20 books everyone should read in their fifties

Books that defined the 1990s

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