The Proof of My Innocence

‘My comfort read: anything by Jonathan Coe’ Bob Mortimer

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Post-university life doesn’t suit Phyl. Time passes slowly, living with her parents and working a zero-hours contract at Heathrow Airport, while her budding plans of becoming a writer are going nowhere.

That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He’s been investigating a radical think tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that’s been scheming to push the British government in an ever more extreme direction. When he follows this story to a conference in a rambling old hotel deep in the Cotswolds, events take a bizarre and sinister turn. Soon he is caught up in a world of cryptic clues, secret passages and, eventually, murder.

In the end, despite the efforts of a suitably eccentric detective, it falls to Phyl herself – ably assisted by Chris’s outspoken adopted daughter Rashida – to look for answers to the fatal mystery. But will they lie in contemporary politics, or in a literary enigma that is almost forty years old?

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‘A new Jonathan Coe is always a treat . . . Coe is a master at exploring the pains of modern life’ Rosamund Urwin, The Times

‘Probably the best English novelist of his generation’ Nick Hornby

‘Deeply pleasurable, and a lot of fun. You emerge from it glowing’ iPaper