The Rotter’s Club by Jonathan Coe

The Rotter’s Club by Jonathan Coe

Summary of The Rotters’ Club   “The Rotters’ Club” follows three teenage schoolboys – Ben Trotter, Doug Anderson and Philip Chase – as they grow up in Birmingham during the 1970s. The novel explores their love lives, musical interests and the...
Atonement by Ian McEwan

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Summary of Atonement   In the summer of 1935, on the country estate of her family in Surrey, 13-year-old Briony Tallis mistakenly identifies Robbie Turner – a family friend and the lover of her elder sister, Cecilia – as the man who assaulted her cousin,...
White Teeth by Zadie Smith

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Summary of White Teeth   “White Teeth” centres on two friends and their families in north-west London from the 1970s to the 1990s: Archie Jones, an Englishman married to the much younger Clara Bowden, a woman of Jamaican descent, and Samad Iqbal, a Bangladeshi...
An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

Summary of An Instance of the Fingerpost   “An Instance of the Fingerpost” is a historical novel set in seventeenth-century Oxford, centred on the poisoning of the theologian Dr Robert Grove. A young servant, Sarah Blundy, is hanged for the crime, but the novel...
Ingenious Pain Andrew Miller

Ingenious Pain Andrew Miller

Summary of Ingenious Pain   “Ingenious Pain” is a historical novel set in 18th-century England and Russia. It follows the extraordinary life of James Dyer, an Englishman born without the ability to feel physical pain. After a difficult childhood, and a serious of...