The Proof of My Innocence

'My comfort read: anything by Jonathan Coe' Bob Mortimer <BR><BR>'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<BR><BR>---<BR><BR> 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.<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>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?<BR> <BR>---<BR><BR>'A new Jonathan Coe is always a treat . . . Coe is a master at exploring the pains of modern life' Rosamund Urwin, The Times<BR><BR>'Please, God ... if there's a next life, let me write as well as Jonathan Coe' Anthony Bourdain<BR><BR>'Probably the best English novelist of his generation' Nick Hornby<BR><BR>'Deeply pleasurable, and a lot of fun. You emerge from it glowing' iPaper <BR>