The Proof of My Innocence

‘My comfort read: anything by Jonathan Coe’ Bob Mortimer

‘Coe channels his anger and frustration at the direction his country has taken, as well as his abiding love for it, into prose of enduring beauty’ Guardian

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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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‘A new Jonathan Coe is always a treat . . . Coe is a master at exploring the pains of modern life’ Rosamund Urwin, The Times

‘Please, God … if there’s a next life, let me write as well as Jonathan Coe’ Anthony Bourdain

‘Probably the best English novelist of his generation’ Nick Hornby