What a Carve Up!
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  • Published: 25 April 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241987186
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download

What a Carve Up!

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

Formats & editions
EBook
3 Sep 2008
Audiobook
25 Apr 2019
Audiobook
25 Mar 2010
Paperback
1 Oct 2016
Paperback
27 Aug 2014
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'Probably the best English novelist of his generation' Nick Hornby

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe, read by Richard Goulding.

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
Jonathan Coe's novels are filled with biting social commentary, moving and astute observations of life and hilarious set pieces that have made him one of the most popular writers of his generation. His other titles, The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Rotters' Club (winner of the Everyman Wodehouse prize), The Closed Circle, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, The House of Sleep (winner of the1998 Prix Médicis Étranger), and The Rain Before it Falls, are all available in Penguin paperback.
  • Published: 25 April 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241987186
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
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About the author

Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His novels include Rotters, The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death and What a Carve Up!, which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Itranger.The House of Sleep won the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award for 1997.

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham, UK, in 1961. He began writing at an early age. His first surviving story, a detective thriller called The Castle of Mystery, was written when he was eight. His first published novel was The Accidental Woman in 1987, but it was his fourth, What a Carve Up!, that established his reputation as one of England’s finest comic novelists, winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1985 and being translated into many languages. Seven bestselling novels and many other awards have followed, including the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for Like A Fiery Elephant, a biography of the experimental novelist, B. S. Johnson. Jonathan lives in London with his wife and two daughters.

Also by Jonathan Coe

Bournville
Middle England
The Proof of My Innocence
Mr Wilder and Me
The Rotters' Club
The Broken Mirror
Number 11
See all

Praise for What a Carve Up!

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

Hilary Mantel

A riveting social satire on the chattering and all-powerful upper classes

Time Out

Big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving

Guardian

Everything a novel ought to be: courageous, challenging, funny, sad - and peopled with a fine troupe of characters

The Times

A grand blast of popular literary entertainment

Laurence O'Toole, New Statesman

One of the most ambitious novels I have read in years and one which has pulled off the seemingly impossible trick of managing to be both amiable and angry at the same time

Spectator

A carve-up of contemporary Britain, What a Carve Up! is also a carve-up of a book, a vertiginous, exquisitely calculated collage of texts-within-texts... one of the few pieces of genuinely political post-modern fiction around

London Review of Books

An unusually entertaining novel, as well as being politically ambitious... it manages to switch from one tone to another with extraordinary deftness

BBC Radio Four

Coe effortlessly spans fifty years of British political change in this hugely entertaining novel, packed full of period detail, from forties schoolboy slang to modern media wars

Lavinia Greenlaw, Vogue