The Winshaw Legacy (Vintage International)

— Jay McInerney

A postmodern detective story, a scathing send-up of the rapacious eighties, a macabre Gothic — all rolled up in a bravura tragicomic entertainment.

The Winshaw family, as their official biographer is warned by old Mortimer Winshaw himself, is the meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of backstabbing penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth.’ Bankers, industrialists, politicians, arms dealers and media barons — they rule Britannia, more or less. They also have a guilty secret in the shape of a mad aunt stashed away in a remote asylum, convinced of familial treachery during World War II and determined to effect the ruin of her entire clan.

In the summer of 1990, while Saddam Hussein is provoking yet another war, the Winshaws’ biographer (a severely depressed young novelist) is piecing together the truth of their sordid legacy, and discovers that it converges bizarrely with the plot of a film he’s been obsessed by since childhood. Moreover, it seems that all of this, dynasty and cinema alike, has some mysterious connection with his own troubled history. Of course whether he — or anybody else — will be alive when this compound riddle is solved remains to be seen.

Savagely funny, hugely inventive and passionately political. The Winshaw Legacy assumes Dickensian proportions as it excoriates the modern age of greed — and heralds the American debut of an extraordinary writer. As The Economist concluded: Talented comic novelists are rare [but] that exclusive club — Thomas Love Peacock, Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse are among its members — has admitted a newcomer, an Englishman called Jonathan Coe.’

‘A remarkable achievement; intelligent, funny, and important.’ — The Times Literary Supplement

‘An extravagant literary blockbuster…A grand and intelligent novel, so full of accomplishment and pleasure.’ — New Statesman & Society’

Really, something to get excited about…his big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving treat of a novel.’ — The Guardian