What a Carve Up! cover art

What a Carve Up!

‘Everything a novel ought to be: courageous, challenging, funny, sad’ The Times

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What a Carve Up!

By: Jonathan Coe
Narrated by: Richard Goulding
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About this listen

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe, read by Richard Goulding.

It is the 1980s and the Winshaw family are getting richer and crueller by the year:

Newspaper-columnist Hilary gets thousands for telling it like it isn't; Henry's turning hospitals into car parks; Roddy's selling art in return for sex; down on the farm Dorothy's squeezing every last pound from her livestock; Thomas is making a killing on the stock exchange; and Mark is selling arms to dictators.

But once their hapless biographer Michael Owen starts investigating the family's trail of greed, corruption and immoral doings, the time growing ripe for the Winshaws to receive their comeuppance. . .

This wickedly funny take on life under the Thatcher government was the winner of the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize


'A sustained feat of humour, suspense and polemic, full of twists and ironies' Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times

'A riveting social satire on the chattering and all-powerful upper classes' Time Out

'Big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving' Guardian

Jonathan Coe's novels are filled with biting social commentary, moving and astute observations of life and hilarious set pieces that have made him one of the most popular writers of his generation. His other titles, The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Rotters' Club (winner of the Everyman Wodehouse prize), The Closed Circle, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, The House of Sleep (winner of the1998 Prix Médicis Étranger), and The Rain Before it Falls, are all available in Penguin paperback.

Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Political Satire Comedy Witty Funny

Critic Reviews

A sustained feat of humour, suspense and polemic, full of twists and ironies (Hilary Mantel)
A riveting social satire on the chattering and all-powerful upper classes
Big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving
Everything a novel ought to be: courageous, challenging, funny, sad - and peopled with a fine troupe of characters
A grand blast of popular literary entertainment (Laurence O'Toole)
One of the most ambitious novels I have read in years and one which has pulled off the seemingly impossible trick of managing to be both amiable and angry at the same time
A carve-up of contemporary Britain, What a Carve Up! is also a carve-up of a book, a vertiginous, exquisitely calculated collage of texts-within-texts... one of the few pieces of genuinely political post-modern fiction around
An unusually entertaining novel, as well as being politically ambitious... it manages to switch from one tone to another with extraordinary deftness
Coe effortlessly spans fifty years of British political change in this hugely entertaining novel, packed full of period detail, from forties schoolboy slang to modern media wars (Lavinia Greenlaw)
All stars
Most relevant
Great performance and, unfortunately, still so relevant to our current political and social climate. Excellent satire, funny and disturbing in equal measure.

Essential reading

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