Middle England

13 hrs. 41 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Jonathan Coe

Narrator Larisa Luganskaya

Once again, Jonathan Coe has pulled off a difficult literary trick—giving us a deeply British novel in which a living whole is made of an extremely timely and very honest look at the social landscape of our time, a detailed, humane observation of the tragicomedy of life in the 2010s, nostalgia, a special contemplative coziness, and the essential irony so dear to us in Coe’s books. But there’s more. “Middle England” is the final part of the trilogy begun in the novels “The Rotters’ Club” and “What a Carve Up!”. Three books have come together into an impressive saga of the modern history of Britain from the 1970s to the present day. We’re back with Benjamin Trakalli, Doug Underdown, and their loved ones, trying to understand the peculiarities of modern Britain—where there’s less and less of that imagined England Tolkien wrote about in Middle-earth. “Middle England” is a journey through a labyrinth of everyday oddities that life is increasingly filling with. It’s a story of an ordinary person fighting the chaos encroaching from all sides—and the weapon, it seems, in a battle already lost in advance, is human warmth and closeness: it’s as if the gloom has thickened and Middle-earth is about to vanish forever, but you can simply look another person in the eyes—and the illusion suddenly dissipates.

3. Middle England (narrated by Alexey Bagdasarov) 3. Middle England