A Verification of My Innocence

A new novel from the master of modern English prose.

The main character, 23-year-old Prim, returns to her parents’ home after university, dreaming of a writing career. But reality proves harsher: instead of creating her own stories, she writes down in a notebook the orders made by visitors at a Japanese café in Heathrow Airport. Yet everything changes when Christopher arrives at their home—an old family friend and tireless exposer of political machinations. For many years he has been trying to uncover the sinister secrets of a think tank founded in Cambridge in the 1980s. Created by university graduates, the center now secretly steers British politics toward extremism. Christopher is on the verge of a breakthrough and a full exposure—but the closer the truth is, the more dangerous it becomes to speak it out loud.

Blending genres, jumping between decades, and breaking patterns, Jonathan Coe creates a novel about paranoia, manipulation, the danger of truth, and bewilderment in the face of the future. “A Check on My Innocence” is not only a political thriller, but also a story about how hard it is to find a voice in a world where access to truth is muffled at the state level. Especially when the line between fiction and reality is blurred so much that even the author sometimes can’t tell one from the other.

Listen to the book in an excellent performance by Grigory Perelya, Maria Orlova, Alexander Gavrilin, and Anastasia Shumilina.

Press reviews:

“Creevely funny and razor-sharp novel by one of Britain’s most loved novelists. Coe moves effortlessly between decades and genres, showing that the key to understanding the present may be hidden in the darkest corners of the past,” — The Times

“The novel is full of tricks, wild twists, deceptive memories; it’s the best that fiction can offer to the era of post-truth—and yes, it’s incredibly fun, but also sometimes scary to read,” — The Guardian

“‘A Check on My Innocence’—a satire that mixes Zoomers with Boomers, leftists with rightists, and the three most popular literary genres with each other,” — Nozh