Coe donated a story to Oxfam's " Ox-Tales" project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Coe's story was published in the Earth collection. [14] Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson, London: Picador, 2004 (winner of the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction) Jonathan Coe’s only regret must be that the book had gone to press before the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Which members of the Lamb family would have spent 48 hours in the queue to see her lying in state, and which would have sympathised with those arrested for anti-royalist activism? We may need a sequel – and, given the pace of British politics, we may need it very soon. Bournville is a quiet village in the heart of England famous for its chocolate. For eleven-year-old Mary, it is the center of her world, the place where most of her family’s friends and neighbors have worked for decades and where the streets smell faintly of chocolate. T)he loving, funny, clear-sighted and ruminative examination of recent British history (.....) As ever, prizing clarity over verbal fireworks, Coe’s writing draws the reader into the family dramas as they unfold over the decades. He has the great gift of combining plausible and engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft. (...) Bittersweet as the eponymous bar of plain chocolate, the book ranges over a huge span of time, includes a large cast of characters, yet never flags nor confuses. (...) The book also builds a deeper integrity out of echoes and motifs, like a piece of music." - Marcel Theroux, The Guardian

Robin (10 April 2019). "Jonathan Coe wins BAUER award 2019 in Italy". Felicity Bryan Associates . Retrieved 10 April 2023. One of the better choices in the book is to have one candidate as a lobbyist for Cadbury in the long-running Chocolate Wars as some other European countries refuse for years to allow English chocolate (with its fat content) to be sold as chocolate – the character’s wife ultimately becoming an MEP based on the strong working knowledge of Brussels they gain. The book’s assertion is that the fat was first added due to wartime shortages and that the British love of UK-style milk-chocolate is effectively a form of post war nostalgia (as an aside there is also the small fact that it tastes delicious). While in Brussels and around the lobby and press group, the character first encounters the tousle haired Boris – and cleverly he re-appears later as a part is set in Cllywd South in Boris’s unsuccessful 1997 general election candidacy (the switch of that very red seat to Conservatives in 2019 when Boris is now party leader also being featured). The treatment of Boris is I felt nuanced – in both Brussels and Wales there is a sneaking admiration for his ability to get people onside through not acting seriously. Later though the Brussels lobbyist despairs that such a character is in charge during COVID times. The author’s note amusingly after the usual disclaimers about resemblances to real people says of his Boris character: “he might, of course, seem familiar to some readers, whether he’s a fictional character or not remains hard to determine with any certainty”

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Preston, Alex (25 November 2018). "Middle England by Jonathan Coe review – Brexit comedy". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 28 December 2018. 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 -- Amanda Craig, author of The Golden Rule British author Jonathan Coe, European Book Prize 2019 winner". France24. 9 December 2019 . Retrieved 28 November 2021. This novel is perhaps even more explicitly a social examination of the state of the nation but is more straightforward read and without the farcical or spoof elements which made those novels more striking. Full of vibrant characters and fabulous dialogue, which switches from laugh-out-loud funny to extremely poignant Independent

As ever, prizing clarity over verbal fireworks, Coe’s writing draws the reader into the family dramas as they unfold over the decades. He has the great gift of combining plausible and engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft. A compelling social history that's sprinkled throughout with Coe's inimitable humour, love and white-hot anger Evening Standard 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 Amanda Craig, author of The Golden Rule Coe wrote the sleevenotes "Reflections on The High Llamas" for the 2003 compilation of The High Llamas Retrospective, Rarities and Instrumentals. He has also written lyrics for songs on the albums My Favourite Part of You and The Wonder of It All by Louis Philippe, and Earth to Ether by Theo Travis, for which the vocalist was Richard Sinclair.

Disappointing stuff. I think this novel was trying to do way too much and as a result didn't end up achieving any of it. short review for busy readers: Definitely not one of Coe's best. Good concept and well-written, but muddled and tedious in plot, overly biased/blatant in approach, and lazy in the characterisation of too many characters who are only shades different from each other, with very few exceptions. Slow read. Not recommended, esp not as a place to start with Coe's work. When Mary and Geoffrey get engaged, Geoffrey still feels some anxiety, knowing: "he would never quite feel sure of her until the vows were spoken and the wedding ring was on her finger", and she does, in fact, have another suitor; this possibility of how everything could have been different in just slightly different circumstances also hangs nicely over the novel. A beautiful, and often very funny, tribute to an underexamined place and also a truly moving story of how a country discovered tolerance' Sathnam Sanghera, bestselling author of Empireland

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

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Bournville is presented as A Novel in Seven Occasions, each of the seven sections set around a significant event that was the talk of the nation -- Great Britain -- at the time. Jonathan Coe is chronicler of contemporary events. It’s a style of writing from which he does not waver. If I was to be critical there’s a sense of his writing by numbers; If I'm being positive its apparent that the course of history is endlessly fascinating and so there is a pipeline of lived life for Coe to draw on.

Music is a constant thread in Coe's work. He played music for years and tried to find a record label as a performer before becoming a published novelist. He had to wait until 2001 to make his first appearance on a record with 9th & 13th (Tricatel, 2001), a collection of readings of his work, set to music by jazz pianist/double bass player Danny Manners and indiepop artist Louis Philippe.Jonathan Coe never gives his characters short shrift. Despite the 75-year time span and the large cast of characters, the book is eminently readable and defines characters through the events they lived through. Particularly insightful is when one of the younger characters, with pretensions of becoming a world-famous author, slams into reality when his glossy portrayal of Wales collides with the truth of Britain’s treatment of it. Coe himself has said in a recent interview that “the prose I write is very rarely poetic” and that he “regards it as a positive” that his books are easy to read – and without the inventiveness of “What A Carve Up” that straightforwardness is starker here and perhaps a little in contrast to much of the literary fiction I normally enjoy. The writing though does remain engaging and enjoyable. In terms of writing, he thinks “cosy crime is the way to go”. Surprisingly, given its high-profile adopters, such as Richard Osman and Reverend Richard Coles, who are making a tidy killing from this most English of genres, Coe discovered it in a bookshop in France, where a whole shelf was labelled “cosy crime”. “It’s another of those British cultural phenomena which people don’t realise is so popular in other countries.” It seems the perfect match for Coe’s nostalgic Englishness and neat storytelling. Covid και του Brexit, περνώντας από την ενθρόνιση της Ελισσάβετ, το Μουντιάλ της Αγγλίας του 1966, το χρίσμα του Καρόλου ως πρίγκιπα της Ουαλίας (κάποιοι διαμαρτυρήθηκαν ότι ο πρίγκιπας της Ουαλίας θα έπρεπε να είναι Ουαλός), ο γάμος Καρόλου-Νταίάνας, το θάνατο της πριγκίπισσας Νταιϊάνα και "τη μάχη της σοκολάτας" στο ευρωκοινοβούλιο και με αρκετό τρυφερό σαρκασμό για τον Μπόρις Τζόνσον. Mr Coe’s characters observe social change, technological developments, cultural shifts and political turmoil. Some find themselves embroiled in Britain’s “Chocolate War” with the European Union, others have their plans derailed by covid-19 restrictions. Mr Coe skilfully traces fault lines that divide the country while depicting family rifts, and he offsets TV commentaries of royal events—weddings, funerals and the queen’s “ponderous, arcane” coronation—with his characters’ thoughts and opinions.