Closed Circle

On New Year's Eve of 1999, with Tony Blair presiding over a glossy new version of Britain, Benjamin Trotter watches the celebration on television in the same Birmingham house where he'd grown up. Paul begins an affair with his young assistant. At the same time, Benjamin and Claire, still haunted by memories almost thirty years old, make a desperate attempt to break free of the past. "The Closed Circle" shuttles between London and Birmingham, where its rich cast of characters contends with startling revelations about their youth and the pressing, perennial problems of love, vocation, and family. Jonathan Coe has won the Prix Medicis Etranger, and the author of "The Rotter's Club."