In this episode, Adam Biles welcomes Jonathan Coe to Shakespeare and Company in Paris for a rich, funny, and wide-ranging conversation about Coe’s genre-bending novel The Proof of My Innocence. What begins as a playful pastiche of a cozy crime mystery evolves into three interlocking novellas—a whodunnit, a piece of dark academia, and a fragment of autofiction—that push at the limits of storytelling itself. Coe discusses why crime fiction offers comfort in anxious times, how the destabilising politics of late 2022 (from Liz Truss to the Queen’s death) seeped into the book, and why he’s increasingly drawn to overtly fictional narratives in an age suspicious of facts. He reflects on class, Cambridge, generational politics, and the powerful role fiction plays in preserving memory. Filled with humour and insight, the conversation offers both a defence of storytelling and a portrait of Britain in flux.

Buy The Proof of My Innocence: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/the-proof-of-my-innocence-3

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of fifteen novels, including What a Carve Up!, The Rotters’ Club, Middle England and, most recently, The Proof of My Innocence. He has won the Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Européen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, among many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. Jonathan Coe lives in London.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

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See It, Say It, Sorted: Jonathan Coe’s Genre-Bending Novel

The Shakespeare and Company Interview

See It, Say It, Sorted: Jonathan Coe’s Genre-Bending Novel