Jonathan Coe The Proof of My Innocence

Annotation

Post-university life doesn t suit Phyl. Time passes slowly, living with her parents and working a zero-hours contract at Heathrow Airport, while her budding plans of becoming a writer are going nowhere. That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He s been investigating a radical think tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that s been scheming to push the British government in an ever more extreme direction. When he follows this story to a conference in a rambling old hotel deep in the Cotswolds, events take a bizarre and sinister turn. Soon he is caught up in a world of cryptic clues, secret passages and, eventually, murder. In the end, despite the efforts of a suitably eccentric detective, it falls to Phyl herself ably assisted by Chris s outspoken adopted daughter Rashida - to look for answers to the fatal mystery. But will they lie in contemporary politics, or in a literary enigma that is almost forty years old?