The Rotters' Club

Sep 10, 2025 10:56 PM

Author:Jonathan Coe,Jeff Rawle

The Rotters' Club

'Probably the best English novelist of his generation' Nick Hornby

Jonathan Coe's widely acclaimed novel is set in the 1970s 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 onto 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.

'One of those sweeping, ambitious yet hugely readable, moving, richly comic novels that you find all too rarely in English fiction ... a masterpiece' Daily Telegraph

Downloadable, abridged audiobook edition read by Jeff Rawle.

Reviews

A psychologically brilliant study of heartlessness

—— Sunday Telegraph

One of the finest writers alive

—— Sunday Times

Full of gusto, straightforward, and delivers blows to the gut...shocking

—— A. S. Byatt , Literary Review

McEwan writes here with unobtrusive panache

—— Daily Telegraph

Amsterdam is brilliantly engineered and marvellously entertaining

—— Evening Standard

Even more timely today than when it won the Booker in 1998

—— Val Hennessy , Daily Mail

The novel twists and turns unexpectedly...McEwan has a master's control over his instrument

—— John Sutherland , Sunday Times

Darkly impressive

—— The Times

A superb achievement: his prose has instant, lucid beauty and his narrative voice has a perfect poise and certainty. His account of deprivation and survival is marvellously sure, and the imaginative alignment of his story is exactly right

—— Tom Paulin

It is difficult to fault the writing or the construction of this eerie fable

—— Sunday Times

The Kindly Ones has been hailed as the return of the great European realistic novel.

—— Sunday Herald

I dedicated most of the summer to Jonathan Littell's much-praised, internationally bestselling blockbuster and loved almost every minute of it...a magnificent achievement

—— James Delingpole , Spectator

An immense novel...The depth of detail is astounding and authentic

—— Doug Kemp , Historical Novels Review

A masterpiece

—— Antony Beevor , Seven Magazine, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year

An extremely disturbing novel

—— Toby Clements , Daily Telegraph

A remarkable and controversial novel

—— Jason Burke , Observer

Jonathan Littell veers between brilliance and bathos...

—— Sally Cousins , The Telegraph

Grotesque, dismaying, chilling in its focus on the fine detail of barbarism, this epic of evil is also addictively readable

—— Boyd Tonkin , Independent on Sunday

Compelling... utterly engaging... for anyone whose interest in his subjects is great to enough to bear their unflinching portrayal The Kindly Ones is an essential novel

—— Chris Power , The Times

It's an amazing picture of evil, wonderfully written (and very well translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell), and left me feeling as though I had supped with the damned

—— Jane Knight , The Times

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