Winner of the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! is a wickedly funny take on life under the Thatcher government through the lives of members of the same, disturbingly functional family.

It is the 1980s and the Winshaw family are getting richer and crueller by the year:

Newspaper-columnist Hilary gets thousands for telling it like it isn’t; Henry’s turning hospitals into car parks; Roddy’s selling art in return for sex; down on the farm Dorothy’s squeezing every last pound from her livestock; Thomas is making a killing on the stock exchange; and Mark is selling arms to dictators.

But once their hapless biographer Michael Owen starts investigating the family’s trail of greed, corruption and immoral doings, the time growing ripe for the Winshaws to receive their comeuppance. . .

‘A sustained feat of humour, suspense and polemic, full of twists and ironies’ Hilary Mantel,Sunday Times

‘A riveting social satire on the chattering and all-powerful upper classes’ Time Out

‘Big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving’ Guardian

Jonathan Coe’s novels are filled with biting social commentary, moving and astute observations of life and hilarious set pieces that have made him one of the most popular writers of his generation. His other titles, The Rotters’ Club, The Closed Circle, The Accidental Woman, The Dwarves of Death, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, The House of Sleep (winner of the 1998 Prix Médicis Étranger), A Touch of Love and The Rain Before it Falls, are all available in Penguin paperback.