The Rotters' Club cover art

The Rotters' Club

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

The Rotters' Club

By: Jonathan Coe
Narrated by: Nicholas Burns
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Unforgettably funny and painfully honest, Jonathan Coe's tale of Benjamin Trotter and his friends' coming of age during the 1970s is a heartfelt celebration of the joys and agonies of growing up.

Featuring, among other things, IRA bombs, prog rock, punk rock, bad poetry, first love, love on the side, prefects, detention, a few bottles of Blue Nun, lots of brown wallpaper, industrial strife, and divine intervention in the form of a pair of swimming trunks.

Set against the backdrop of the decade's class struggles, tragic and riotous by turns, packed with thwarted romance and furtive sex, The Rotters' Club is for anyone who ever experienced adolescence the hard way.

©2019 Jonathan Coe (P)2019 Penguin Audio Coming of Age Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Fiction Heartfelt

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Brief cover art
Crossing the Lines cover art
Ed Reardon's Week: Series 1-4 cover art
Staying On cover art
A House for Mr. Biswas cover art
Blue Sky Adam cover art
And the Land Lay Still cover art
The Dandelion Years cover art
Curious cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
This novel is a must and will give listeners and readers great satisfaction and much pleasure. Coe sets his novel in the Birmingham of the 1970s. He captures the historical times, its social, cultural and political tapestry, and the mixed group of teenagers trying to make sense of themselves in the midst of it all nestled in their school for the elite. This has its limitations. Whilst Coe details social diversity in the world of work, it is largely absent in education save for there being one black student at his school and one the son of a trade union official. Those students from state schools less advantaged do not appear, even though using the same buses and bus stops that he refers to many times. Coe’s school world is, therefore, partial. Odd when it would have been exactly those who would have seen their parents’ working lives frequently disrupted by strikes and the family income hit. It is a point to be made, not to slate the book. That said, Coe writes with freedom, mixing his narrative styles. He surprises and delights, as well as managing a wonderful sensitivity relating to a terrorist outrage, yet pulling no punches. There are many, many laughs, things to wince at and to applaud. Do not feel that you have to know Birmingham or the details of what the ‘seventies’ were like; he gives you all you need to know without losing sight of his characters and their growth. You will find your reactions to the characters flexing through the novel, which for me makes for greater interest. You simply do not want to leave these characters. The book-ending sections (front and back) are more than intriguing and heralds rewards in the sequel – ‘The Closed Circle’. This is already listened to with the third novel in the run -‘Middle England’ - waiting to be listened to. As someone who grew up and worked in the exact areas in which the book is set, it all reads true (painfully at times) – from filing documents by the light of hurricane lamps in a bank in 1973 during the power cuts, to walking a girl home at night, under the gaze of one of the characters in this book keeping watch from a darkened front-room! This audio-book is convincingly performed and extremely well read. Listen to it and you will be committed to the wonderful trilogy.

A Roller-Coaster Through the Seventies

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I read this book many years ago and absolutely loved it.
Listening to it again it’s still a gem of wit.
One his best books in my opinion

Funny and dark at the same time

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Transported me back to the 70s and the growing pains of teen-hood. Coe is a master of social commentary and his characters simply leap out of the page. Simply brilliant.

Can’t wait to read book2 and continue the journey.

Brilliant!!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Can definitely recommend, thoughtfully structured and written. Funny, interesting, and animated characters. It’s a nice story, one you can look forward to and enjoy being involved in, and it describes a familiar and personal world.

Brilliantly written, brilliantly narrated.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A well observed and poignant reflection on the seventies from the viewpoint of several young protagonists.

Well observed

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
superb characterisation and beautifully drawn plot that cleverly whisks you back to the 1970s in all that decade's excitement, squalor and hubris. a book that made me laugh out loud at some points and come close to tears at others.

brilliant book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Quite possibly the worst Brummie accents this side of peaky blinders! Well to be honest
non-existent which is a shame as it sounds as though it was set in Tunbridge Wells. The cultural references were interesting; having grown up around the same time and in Birmingham they were quite loaded but in places seemed a little over done. story was good; a bit soapy but enjoyable nonetheless. off to try the next installment. . .

potty mouth Adrian mole?

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I enjoyed this book overall, there were some terrific laugh out loud moments, plus some poignant ones. I think it was too long and some chapters just seemed to ramble uncontrollably and tediously (I realise this was part of the characterisation in some instances!) but it needed some severe editing. Enjoyable though and I will try some further Jonathan Coe novels.

A good romp, but...

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Superb in every way. I love Jonathan Cow’s writing and this is my favourite. The reader was perfect so highly recommended

Superb! I don’t mind leaving a review..

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A brilliant set of tales from people growing up in the 1970s. Full of emotion, humour and tragedy, this is a book that will live with you for years.

Superb from start to finish

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews