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What a Carve Up!

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What to expect

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.

Critics Review

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
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
Vogue

User Reviews

Book 4.0
Narration 5.0
Author Jonathan Coe
Narrator Richard Goulding
Duration 15 hours and 41 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9780241987186
Format Audiobook
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Genre Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Politics, Satirical fiction and parodies
Availability AU, GB, IE
Rating
4.0 (1 review)
Narration
5.0 (1 review)

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