As the latest in J Coe's Unrest sequence, Bournville is one of the most warm-hearted, brilliant and beguiling of his State of the Nation novels. 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). Born in 1961 in what is now the West Midlands, since his debut The Accidental Woman in 1987 Jonathan Coe has carved out a niche as one of Britain’s finest exponents of satiric cultural observation. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades.

The beans themselves had always come from the far corners of the Empire, of course - nothing unBritish about that - but the means of turning them into edible chocolate had been invented by a Dutchman, and it was a truth universally acknowledged - if for ever unspoken - that it was the French, and the Belgians, and the Swiss, who had since brought the making of chocolate to a pitch of near-perfection. I can only guess, but it seems like Coe chose a topic and plot structure he couldn't bring himself to work seriously with in the end.Educated in Edgbaston, one gathers from the epilogue that many of the locales featured in Bournville are/were familiar to him in his younger years. Hie latest novel, MIDDLE ENGLAND, published by Penguin in November 2018, reintroduces characters from The Rotters' Club and puts them against a background of real events in the UK before and after the Brexit referendum. Despite the 75-year time span and the large cast of characters, the book is eminently readable and defines characters through the events they lived through. In the Birmingham suburb of Bournville, site of a famous chocolate factory, a family celebrates VE Day in 1945.

There are other problems, like too many similar characters, but the ones I've listed above are the main ones.It follows four generations of a family in seven sections which cover some of the most famous events of the last 75 years including the coronation, a royal wedding and funeral, the 1966 World Cup and the covid pandemic.