
The Proof of My Innocence
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Narrated by:
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Sam Woolf
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Alana Maria
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Charlotte Worthing
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Mark Stobbart
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Roy McMillan
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By:
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Jonathan Coe
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
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?
'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
'My comfort read: anything by Jonathan Coe' Bob Mortimer
'Coe shows an understanding of this country that goes beyond what most cabinet ministers can muster . . . he is a master of satire but pokes fun subtly, without ever being cruel, biting or blatant . . . his light, funny writing makes you feel better' Evening Standard
'A novelist who gains in range and reputation with every book' Pat Barker
'Please, God … if there’s a next life, let me write as well as Jonathan Coe' Anthony Bourdain
'Probably the best English novelist of his generation' Nick Hornby
©2024 Jonathan Coe (P)2024 Penguin Audio
Sorry it had to end
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Not a favourite of Jonathan Coe’s novels
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Originality. Done well
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Okay
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A very satisfying listen
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None of the characters engaged my interest. In fact, I found several of them interchangeable, which makes a complicated and multi-perspective narrative even more convoluted. I didn’t care what happened to any of these sketchy people and was eye-rollingly bored by their musings on modernist literature. Oddments of what seem to be Coe’s recent discoveries are inserted into the narrative - did he travel from Nice to Venice, eat at a sushi bar, see a painting of a slave ship and hear the folk song Lord Randall all for the first time recently? These things all pop up and add little. In fact some sections read almost parody Dan Brown, which is a dangerous path. Maybe braver editing is needed.
Over complicated plot with the odd interesting scene
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Overall was not for me, navel gazing uk politics and student viewpoints were tedious
middling
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The Perfect Pairing of Politics and Whodunit
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Wonderfully entertaining and thought-provoking
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Fun and well-performed
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