The Proof of My Innocence

Post-university life doesn’t suit Phyl. Time passes slowly living back home with her parents, working a zero-hour contract serving Japanese food to holidaymakers at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. As for her budding plans of becoming a writer, those are going nowhere.

That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He’s been on the path to uncover a sinister think-tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that’s been scheming to push the British government in a more extreme direction. One that’s finally poised to put their plans into action.

But speaking truth to power can be dangerous – and power will stop at nothing to stay on top.

As Britain finds itself under the leadership of a new Prime Minister whose tenure will only last for seven weeks, Chris pursues his story to a conference being held deep in the Cotswolds, where events take a sinister turn and a murder enquiry is soon in progress. But will the solution to the mystery lie in contemporary politics, or in a literary enigma that is almost forty years old?

Darting between decades and genres, The Proof of My Innocence is a wickedly funny and razor-sharp new novel from one of Britain’s most beloved novelists, showing how the key to understanding the present can often be found in the murkiest corners of the past.

About the Author

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His novels include What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, The Rotters' Club, The Rain Before It Falls and Number 11. He has won many literary prizes at home and abroad, and his biography of the writer B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, won the Samuel Johnson Prize. In 2017 he published a novella for children, The Broken Mirror. His novel, Middle England, published by Penguin in November 2018, reintroduces characters from The Rotters' Club and puts them against a background of real events in the UK before and after the Brexit referendum.

Dimensions: 15.3 x 4 x 23.4 cm