Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

Published 22 February 2001
Jonathan Coe's new novel is set in the 1970s, but this is more than just the decade of flares and glam rock. Against a distant backdrop of strikes, terrorist attacks and growing racial tension, a group of young friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine and begin to put their own distinctive spin on to events in the wider world. A zestful comedy of personal and social upheaval, THE ROTTERS' CLUB captures a fateful moment in British politics - the collapse of 'Old Labour' - and imagines its impact on the topsy-turvy world of the bemused teenager: a world in which a lost pair of swimming trunks can be just as devastating as an IRA bomb.