"Reflective and compelling, satirical and tender, wildly
imaginative and painstakingly realistic." -Chris Lehmann, The
Washington Post Book World
"The gritty, cross-pond equivalent to Look Homeward,
Angel. . . . The pangs of embarrassment, the anguish of
uncertainty, the awkwardness of success [are] vividly present
here." - Mike Francis, The Oregonian
"Funny and astute . . . The strength of The Rotters'
Club lies in its comic humanity." - Stephen Amidon,
The Atlantic Monthly
"Please, God . . . if there's a next life, let me write as well as
Jonathan Coe. The Rotters' Club offers a thick
slice of seventies Birmingham-sharp, acerbic, and menacingly true;
a sad, funny, thoroughly engaging look at compromise, complicity,
and change in a decade many of us would choose to forget." -Anthony
Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential and
A Cook's Tour
"Its tinder-dry combustion of comic, indignant and elegiac
suggests an Evelyn Waugh of the left." -Richard Eder, The New
York Times Book Review
"A thrillingly traitorous work. It hums along for a hundred
pages of wise comedy about teenage love's mortifications, then cold
cocks us with an honest surprise as cruel as it is earned." -David
Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
"Jonathan Coe is a mesmerizing writer. . . . The Rotters'
Club is a wonderfully gripping novel, by turns funny,
heartbreaking and terrifying." -The Seattle Times
"The novel's many intricate parts manage to mesh and turn with the
startling harmony you find in Robert Altman's movies." -Todd
Pruzan, The Village Voice
"If there's a contemporary novelist who combines sharp and
sometimes savage social commentary with the classic, full-blooded
pleasures novels are supposed to give readers as well as Jonathan
Coe does, I must have missed him." -Charles Taylor, Salon.com
and from the UK . . .
"A must-read for anyone who cares about contemporary literature."
-Katie Owen, The Telegraph
"Filled with characters whose destinies we care about, whose
welfare moves us. This is the simplest but highest calling of
literature." -William Sutcliffe, The Independent on
Sunday
"As always with Jonathan Coe, the sheer intelligent good nature
that suffuses his work makes it a pleasure to read." -Peter
Bradshaw, The Guardian
"As a study of adolescence, it is hard to beat. The aching naivety
and intensity of the main characters made me think of Salinger."
-John de Falbe, The Spectator
"Coe handles his complex approach to a complex era effortlessly,
and the end product is a compulsive and gripping read." -Paul
Connolly, The Times
"At once uproariously entertaining and deadly serious-a comedy of
manners and mores, but also a conscientious and politically charged
reminder of an age quite easily forgotten, yet not far removed from
our own." -Henry Hitchings, Times Literary
Supplement
"Like all of Coe's novels, The Rotters' Club is
brilliant, funny, apposite, informed and unflaggingly
truth-seeking." -Rachel Cusk, The Evening Standard
"Superior entertainment. The pages seem to turn themselves."
-Hugo Barnacle, The New Statesman