Middle England

16 hrs. 55 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Jonathan Coe

Narrator Alexey Bagdasarov

Once again, Jonathan Coe has pulled off this tricky authorial feat—giving us a deeply British novel where the living whole is made up of a super-contemporary and very honest view of the social landscape of our time, a detailed human observation of the tragicomedy of life in the 2010s, nostalgia, a special, contemplative coziness, and the ever-present irony so dear to us in Coe’s books. But that’s not all. “Middle England” is the final installment of the trilogy begun in the novels “What a Carve Up” and “The Closed Circle.” The three books together form an impressive saga of the newest history of Britain—from the 1970s to the present day. We are back with Benjamin Trakwell, Dug Anderton, and their loved ones as they try to make sense of the oddities of modern Britain, in which there is ever less of that imagined England Tolkien wrote about in Middle-earth. “Middle England” is a journey through a labyrinth of everyday oddities that increasingly fills life. This is a story of a common man’s fight against the chaos pressing in on all sides—and the weapon, seemingly in a battle already lost in advance, is human warmth and closeness: as if the darkness has thickened and Middle-earth is about to vanish forever, but you can simply look another person in the eyes—and the haze suddenly clears.

3. Middle England 3. Middle England (narrated by Larisa Luganskaya)