The Proof of My Innocence

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?

Review

Wonderfully accomplished and darkly funny. The Proof of My Innocence is a murder mystery, a satire on Britain's ever right-ward drift, culminating in Liz Truss; and an inquiry into truth and perception. Jonathan Coe gets better and better -- Luke Harding

A brilliant, shrewd, satirical novel – gimlet-eyed, funny, very clever and a searchingly profound look at the state of this strange country of ours. -- William Boyd

The premier satirist of great British crapness is on killer form in this gag-a-minute mystery - who but Coe would think to structure a book around the abysmal transport police mantra “See It. Say It. Sorted”? ― Observer

A funny, smart and innovative exploration of contemporary British political dynamics -- Nussaibah Younis

A wonderfully farcical and absurd book that puts into perspective the political chaos of post-Brexit Britain ― Foyles

Coe is on engaging form… satiric and entertaining brio ― Sunday Times

Full of energy... a madcap caper, a sideways memoir, a tricksy jeu d’esprit that is also a quiet defence of fiction in a post-truth age, and enormous fun to read ― Guardian

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

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

Endlessly satisfying ― Spectator

About the Author

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of fifteen novels, including What a Carve Up!, The Rotters’ Club, Middle England and, most recently, The Proof of My Innocence. He has wonthe Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Européen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, among many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. Jonathan Coe lives in London.