Post-university life doesn’t suit Phyl. Time passes slowly living back home with her parents, working a zero-hour contract serving Japanese food to holidaymakers at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. As for her budding plans of becoming a writer, those are going nowhere.

That is, until family friend Chris comes to stay. He’s been on the path to uncover a sinister think-tank, founded at Cambridge University in the 1980s, that’s been scheming to push the British government in a more extreme direction. One that’s finally poised to put their plans into action.

But speaking truth to power can be dangerous – and power will stop at nothing to stay on top.

As Britain finds itself under the leadership of a new Prime Minister whose tenure will only last for seven weeks, Chris pursues his story to a conference being held deep in the Cotswolds, where events take a sinister turn and a murder enquiry is soon in progress. But will the solution to the mystery lie in contemporary politics, or in a literary enigma that is almost forty years old?

Darting between decades and genres, THE PROOF OF MY INNOCENCE is a wickedly funny and razor-sharp new novel from one of Britain’s most beloved novelists, showing how the key to understanding the present can often be found in the murkiest corners of the past.

The Proof of My Innocence is a strange book in that it has been written in different genres and is more books within a book. Not sure what I mean? Well, the very long prologue, 32 pages, introduces us to a detective on a train who is getting annoyed at the repeated message being played onboard, ‘See It – Say It – Sort It’. We then meet Phyl who is back living at home and working at a sushi bar after finishing university, though she has a passion for writing a novel.

Phyl’s mother’s friend, political blogger Christopher Swann is staying with the family before attending a Conservative Party conference in the country. Christopher has brought his adopted daughter Rashida along to the house and Phyl and Rashida discuss Phyl’s passion for writing and the different styles she could write including – Cosy Crime, Dark Academia, and Autofiction. These three genres are all within this book, including satire.

The book is split into sections and is set mainly in the UK in 2022 at the time of Liz Truss becoming Prime Minister for just 42 days. I enjoyed the story’s different writing styles and how each section had a different leading person. The book is filled to the brim with politics and this is the brunt of the satire, although for me a lot of the satire failed to land, perhaps because I don’t really have any interest in politics.

Overall, The Proof of My Innocence is certainly different and unique, to me anyway as I haven’t read a book written in various styles, etc before. The book is both realistic and so far-fetched that I found myself rolling my eyes numerous times at some of the scenes. However, the plot was intriguing and kept me interested the whole way through.

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His novels include What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, The Rotters’ Club, The Rain Before It Falls and Number 11.

He has won many literary prizes at home and abroad, and his biography of the writer BS Johnson, Like A Fiery Elephant, won the Samuel Johnson Prize. Feature films have been made of his novels The Dwarves of Death (as Five Seconds To Spare) and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (as La vie très privée de Monsieur Sim). The Rotters’ Club was adapted for BBC television in 2005, starring Sarah Lancashire, Alice Eve and Kevin Doyle.