One of the most admired British novelists of his generation, with a particularly enthusiastic following in Europe, Jonathan Coe brings his sharp but sympathetic eye to bear upon the foibles of modern life in his eagerly awaited new novel, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. A tragi-comic road trip round these islands, involving an all too human protagonist, the book shows all Coe’s flair for combining the appalling and the absurd, as well as his skill in spinning an engaging story out of the most mundane happenings. Maxwell Sim could well become an emblematic figure of his times, in the way that Reginald Perrin was for the 1970s.