Jonathan Coe Books in Order

Phyl, a bored English graduate serving food at Heathrow, is drawn into a real‑life mystery when a journalist dies at a country‑house conference run by a shadowy think tank. What begins as cosy crime twists into a playful, politically charged puzzle about truth and storytelling.

Set around a famous chocolate factory in a Birmingham suburb, Bournville follows Mary and her family from 1945 to the Covid era. Seven landmark national occasions frame a warm, questioning portrait of how one family, and Britain itself, change over seventy‑five years.

Calista, a middle‑aged film composer, looks back to the late 1970s when a chance meeting led her to work with director Billy Wilder on his film Fedora. The job becomes a formative adventure about cinema, exile and the costs of trying to stay in step with changing times.

Middle England returns to Benjamin Trotter and his circle between 2010 and the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, as family ties and friendships strain under political change. Weddings, protests, riots and work dramas mirror a country arguing about what it wants to be.

Structured as five linked stories, Number 11 follows characters connected to an old childhood friendship as they collide with reality TV, political scandal and a billionaire’s eleven‑storey basement. The novel echoes What a Carve Up! while skewering inequality and modern media culture.

Claire finds a fragment of mirror that shows better versions of her town and her own future, from unspoiled streets to smoother teenage years. As she and fellow owner Peter grow up, they must choose between the mirror’s comforting illusions and the demands of real life.

During their daughter’s school prize‑giving, a couple are nudged into painful memories—a childhood piano recording for him, a wartime family loss for her. This short story, structured like a five‑note scale, links music, memory and the quiet cracks in a long marriage.

In this retelling of Gulliver’s Travels for younger readers, Coe follows Lemuel Gulliver from tiny Lilliput to the giant land of Brobdingnag and beyond. The lively adventures highlight questions about power, perspective and what makes a society humane.

Shy civil servant Thomas Foley is sent to oversee a mock English pub at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Between flirtations, diplomatic mishaps and Cold War spying, he has to decide what kind of life he wants beyond the safe routines of his suburban home.

Recently divorced and painfully lonely, Maxwell Sim accepts a strange marketing job that sends him driving a car full of eco‑toothbrushes from London to the Shetland Islands. The trip, punctuated by emails, old stories and a talking satnav, forces him to face how disconnected he’s become.

After elderly Rosamond dies, she leaves cassette tapes describing twenty old photographs for a blind young relative she has lost touch with. As the recordings are played, a quiet, haunting family history of love, neglect and inherited damage emerges across three generations of women.

This brief collection gathers several of Coe’s shorter pieces, including the title story set around two New York avenues. Snapshots of travel, friendship and obsession offer a compact, often playful glimpse of the concerns that run through his larger novels.

Set in the early 2000s, The Closed Circle picks up the Rotters’ Club characters as adults juggling careers, marriages and political compromise. From New Labour spin to the looming Iraq War, their tangled relationships show how idealism hardens—or survives—over time.

In this unconventional biography, Coe pieces together the life of experimental novelist B.S. Johnson from letters, interviews and his own reflections. The book traces Johnson’s fierce commitment to literary innovation alongside the personal struggles that led to his early death.

Four school friends and the Trotter family come of age in 1970s Birmingham amid strikes, factory politics, IRA bombings and the rise of punk. The novel blends awkward first love and teenage dreams with a sharp portrait of a city and country in upheaval.

A group of students share a cliff‑top house in the 1980s, then meet again years later when it has become a clinic for sleep disorders. Narcolepsy, insomnia and an obsessive doctor draw their lives back together in a twisting story about love, identity and control.

Struggling novelist Michael Owen is commissioned to write the history of the fabulously wealthy Winshaw clan, whose members dominate banking, media, farming, politics and arms dealing. As he digs into their lives, this darkly comic mystery becomes a savage portrait of 1980s Britain.

This illustrated biography traces James Stewart’s journey from small‑town Pennsylvania to Hollywood legend and decorated wartime pilot. Coe follows his key films and off‑screen life to show how Stewart’s hesitant drawl and decency came to embody a particular idea of American heroism.

In this compact life of Humphrey Bogart, Coe follows the actor from early struggles on stage and in gangster roles to classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and The African Queen, exploring how he crafted his tough yet oddly vulnerable screen persona.

William dreams of musical greatness but is stuck in a hopeless London band and a going‑nowhere relationship. When he witnesses a bizarre murder linked to another group, he’s pulled into a comic noir mystery that tangles music‑scene ambitions with genuine danger.

Robin, a postgraduate student in Coventry, has spent years not writing his thesis and hiding from adult life. After a humiliating incident in a public park, his carefully limited existence unravels into a darkly funny story of embarrassment, blocked ambition and late‑blooming responsibility.

Maria drifts through university, work, marriage and motherhood as if everything happens by chance, watched by an intrusive narrator who keeps questioning her choices. The novel quietly asks how much of a life is shaped by accident and how much by decisions we barely notice making.