This novel follows a group of friends growing up in Birmingham, England, in the early 1970s. It's a time of great social change, with massive labor strikes and an emerging punk-rock scene. I don't think Coe nailed all this nearly as brilliantly as he did in The Winshaw Legacy (set in the early 1990s), but the book is still quite entertaining, particularly in its empathetic and funny characterizations. It's on its way to mdhistorian.

Received this today, dessa -- thanks and also for the beautiful postcards!

CAUGHT IN ANNAPOLIS MD US

Coming-of-age novels are not my favorites and the 1970s has to be my least favorite decade, but Coe almost has me convinced with _The Rotters' Club_ that his generation (my generation) may have had experiences as significant as the youth of the 1960s. I say 'almost' because if ever he begins to worry he's taking too seriously Ben Trotter (AKA 'Bent Rotter') and the other members of the Club -- a mismatched cluster of would-be middle class kids thrown together at Birmingham's King William's Academy -- he falls back on an authorial (and off-putting) ironic wink at their 1970s-brand narcissism. Still, Coe is so deft at weaving in the subtle class and cultural politics of this transitional period that a reader can't help but admire his sense of history. Ben's musing on the exam failure of the one black kid in his form is a poignant example: "I feel that we have lost Steve, lost him to something, what can you call it?, history, politics, circumstance, it's a horrible feeling, actually a feeling that our time together at school was a sort of brilliant mistake, it was against the normal order of things, and now everything is back to how it is meant to be." (401) Coe promises a sequel that picks up the story in the late 1990s.

RELEASE NOTES:

On the sale shelves in the front lobby