'The premier satirist of great British crapness is on killer form in this gag-a-minute mystery' Observer

'A new Jonathan Coe is always a treat... Coe is a master at exploring the pains of modern life' The Times

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Post-university life doesn't suit Phyl. Time passes slowly, living with her parents and working a zero-hours contract at Heathrow Airport, while her budding plans of becoming a writer are going nowhere.

That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He's been investigating a radical think tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that's been scheming to push the British government in an ever more extreme direction. When he follows this story to a conference in a rambling old hotel deep in the Cotswolds, events take a bizarre and sinister turn. Soon he is caught up in a world of cryptic clues, secret passages and, eventually, murder.

In the end, despite the efforts of a suitably eccentric detective, it falls to Phyl herself - ably assisted by Chris's outspoken adopted daughter Rashida - to look for answers to the fatal mystery. But will they lie in contemporary politics, or in a literary enigma that is almost forty years old?

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'Full of energy... a madcap caper, a sideways memoir, a tricky jeu d'esprit that is also a quiet defence of fiction in a post-truth age, and enormous fun to read' Guardian

'Deeply pleasurable, and a lot of fun. You emerge from it glowing' iPaper

'Fantastic, wickedly funny and gripping. Coe has written a beautifully crafted mystery that dovetails as a sharp, smart, state of the nation' Simon McCleave

'I was delighted... it's clever and political - while also being very funny' John Self

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of 14 novels, which include The Accidental Woman, What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, The Rotters' Club, The Rain Before It Falls, Expo 58, 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 and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, among many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into 22 languages. Suspended Moment, an album of his musical compositions recorded live in Italy, was released on the British Progressive Jazz label in 2023. Jonathan Coe lives in London.