Bournville: From the bestselling author of Middle England

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Perhaps the least predictable choice of event (in fact only unpredictable one) was Charles’s investiture and this did lead to some of the more interesting scenes – a childhood realisation of English-Welsh tensions and even a little twist relating to undercover attempts to dissuade Welsh nationalist activists from direct action. reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name, in the light of the 'carve up' of the UK's resources which some felt was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's right wing Conservative governments of the 1980s. As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the World Wide Web, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary's family - and their country - closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before? Una fabbrica di cioccolato, un piccolo borgo alle porte di Birmingham e quasi un secolo di storia inglese, questi sono gli ingredienti che fanno di questo romanzo una chicca imperdibile!

It is also a potted history of Cadbury’s, the English chocolate maker so loved by the Brits and, now that it is owned by an enormous American company that has ruined it in some ways, is also known throughout the world owing to the new owners’ excellent marketing abilities. Dal canto mio, nel corso della mia presenza su questo sito ho già avuto modo di dire che considero Coe un genio per i quattro libri che ha scritto in gioventù (lo so che li conoscete, ma li cito lo stesso: La banda dei brocchi, La famiglia Winshaw, La casa del sonno ed Il Circolo chiuso), e, siccome si tratta di libri che io non sarei stata in grado di scrivere neanche campando trecento anni, non posso certo rimangiarmi il giudizio.I smiled, laughed and cried - the ending felt particularly poignant and the author's note at the end only added to that. As there are large jumps in time between events, there are also big jumps in the family narrative such as partners, weddings and children. The book makes much also of the assertion - not I think entirely correct - that in 1997 both versions of God Save The Queen (the official and the Sex Pistols one) were simultaneously on the nation’s lips. Ci deve comunque essere un motivo per cui i due autori inglesi che preferisco hanno deciso, pressoché contemporaneamente, di scrivere un libro su una famiglia inglese più o meno negli ultimi settant'anni*, con ragazzi e ragazze che diventano adulti, poi genitori, poi maturi, poi vecchi e intanto i loro figli sono arrivati a loro volta ad essere maturi ed i nipoti sono già in rampa di lancio, mentre l'Inghilterra passa attraverso l'energia del dopoguerra, l'entusiasmo dei sixties, la folle corsa all'edonismo degli anni ottanta fino alla poco dignitosa epopea di un primo ministro con una capigliatura biondissima perennemente spettinata (ad ognuno il suo: a noi ne toccò uno con i capelli malamente trapiantati).

From WWII, the story follows Mary as she grows up alongside major events, such as Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and the year England won the soccer World Cup. During the next three-quarters of a century, Mary will have children and grandchildren and great-children. 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. Jonathan Coe, με τίτλο Bournville, είναι έργο της συγγραφικής του ωριμότητας, στο οποίο κινείται με χαρακτηριστική άνεση στο χρόνο, από το ξέσπασμα της πανδημίας στο τέλος του Β Παγκοσμίου πολέμου∙ στο τόπο, από το Mπέρμινχαμ στο Βερολίνο, την Ουαλία και τις Βρυξέλλες∙ και σε διαφορετικούς αφηγηματικούς τρόπους. This book is set in Bournville in Birmingham where the famous Cadbury's factory produced some of the nation's favourite chocolate bars.The Rotters' Club was adapted for BBC television in 2005, starring Sarah Lancashire, Alice Eve and Kevin Doyle.

Feature films have been made of his novels The Dwarves of Death (as Five Seconds To Spare) and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (as La vie très privée de Monsieur Sim). In style at least "Bourneville" is in many ways similar to the Rotter's Club trilogy using key moments in history to anchor the story, albeit this time in a much compressed format; anyone who enjoyed the Trotter books will most probably enjoy "Bourneville".We meet Geoffrey’s cousin, Sylvia, and her husband, Thomas, whom we recognise from Coe’s earlier novels Expo 58 and The Rain Before It Falls. As Coe mentions in his author’s notes, Bournville is loosely related to his Unrest series as Mary is Sylvia Foley’s cousin. Several big milestone events for the monarchy in the 20th century - the Queen's coronation, Charles and Diana's wedding, Diana's death - are titles of sections of the book and feature quite heavily, and I get that Coe was trying to say that whilst the lives of the characters moved on and these big events happened things didn't really change that much for the lives of ordinary people of the UK. Told with compassion, steadiness, decency and always a glint in the eye, this is a novel that both challenges and delights.

The political backdrop has also thrown up extraordinary events already, in the UK, with Johnson and Truss demonstrating how fertile this ground continues to be. The characters are believable and well drawn, the premise is tantalising and skillfully constructed. But this was a village founded on enterprise, and that enterprise was to sell chocolate, and even in the hearts of the Cadburys, these pioneers of British chocolate manufacture, there lurked a residual sense of the inferiority of the native product, compared to its Continental rivals. and Number 11 , and family sagas such as The Rotters' Club and The Rain Before It Falls , his novels have won prizes at home and abroad, including Costa Novel of the Year and the Prix du Livre Européen (both for Middle England ).

Set in Coe's nativeMidlands and told through thelives of four generations of onefamily, beginning with 11-year-oldMary in 1945, Bournville is apoignant, clever and witty portraitof social change and how theBritish see themselves. Other than that I could not keep track of all the characters (senior moments) but interesting commentary on our obsession with the last war and enmity with the Germans.