The Closed Circle

Front Cover
Viking, 2004 - Fiction - 432 pages
The Closed Circle is a sequel to Coe's The Rotter's Club. The characters who appeared in the earlier book as Seventies' teenagers reappear here in their New Millennium incarnations: sadder, most of them, but not, on the whole, wiser. In all, to varying degrees, the lineaments of their adolescent selves remain visible beneath the carapace of middle age and its failures or successes. At the centre of the novel is Paul Trotter, a still point of modish vacuousness around whom swirl fragments of narrative that resolve themselves at the end of the novel into a sudden shock of revelation. He has mutated from a teenage Young Tory into a keen Blairite MP whose love affair with the media is matched only by his obsession with his young and ravishingly pretty media adviser, Malvina.

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How Novels Work
John Mullan
No preview available - 2006

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