What a Carve Up!

‘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’

— Tom Shone in the Spectator

‘A grand blast of popular literary entertainment’—Laurence O’Toole in the New Statesman & Society

‘Something far more rich and strange than social satire … Michael, in the book, says the essential quality of good writing is “brio”. I would go along with that, and What a Carve Up! has brio to spare. I enjoyed it very much’—John Mortimer in the Mail on Sunday

‘Coe effortlessly spans fifty years of British political and social change in this hugely entertaining novel, packed full of period detail, from forties schoolboy slang to modern media wars’

— Lavinia Greenlaw in Vogue

‘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’—Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books

‘An unusually entertaining novel, as well as being politically ambitious … it manages to switch from one tone to another with extraordinary deftness. It reminded me of something like Catch-22, which keeps you laughing and yet doesn’t shy away from the horrors that it’s writing about’—Nicolette Jones on Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio Four