Jonathan Coe

Robin once had promise. Now he has an unfinished thesis in his drawer. Hidden away in his room in Coventry, he writes a sequence of short stories in four notebooks, each an oblique commentary on his circumstances. Then a comical misunderstanding in a public park lands him in serious trouble.

Sarah is narcoleptic. Her inability to distinguish between dreams and waking reality gives rise to many misunderstandings. For Terry, a disillusioned film critic, sleep is merely a memory. For Dr Dunstan, sleep is nothing less than a global disease. Constructed to reflect the different stages of sleep, "The House of …

Expo 58 - Good-looking girls and sinister spies: a naive Englishman at loose in Europe in Jonathan Coe's brilliant comic novelLondon, 1958: unassuming civil servant Thomas Foley is plucked from his desk at the Central Office of Information and sent on a six-month trip to Brussels. His task: to keep an eye on The …