 The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe (Penguin, 2010) Maxwell Sim seems to have hit rock bottom. Estranged from his father, newly divorced, unable to communicate with his only daughter, he realizes that while he may have seventy-four friends on Facebook, there is nobody in the world with whom he can actually share his problems. Then a business proposition comes his way – a strange exercise in corporate PR that will require him to spend a week driving from London to a remote retail outlet on the Shetland Isles. Setting out with an open mind, good intentions and a friendly voice on his SatNav for company, Maxwell finds that this journey soon takes a more serious turn, and carries him not only to the furthest point of the United Kingdom, but into some of the deepest and darkest corners of his own past. In his sparkling and hugely enjoyable new book Jonathan Coe reinvents the picaresque novel for our time.
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is a story for our times: Maxwell finds himself all at sea in the modern world, struggling to keep himself afloat when all the familiar landmarks have gone. It's a novel with a family mystery at its core, an astute and occasionally hilarious satire on our hi-tech world, but above all a story of survival.
Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He has written eight previous novels, most recently The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010), all of which are available in Penguin. His biography of the novelist B. S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, won the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction book of the year.
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