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This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

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Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service, with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today has written a host of novels which collectively present a compelling,

humane, funny, sometimes farcical picture of contemporary Britain.

Jonathan Coeweaves complex plots with characters who reappear in different books,

from The Rotters Club to his latest Middle England.

His determination to chart the way we live now and the state of the

nation has echoes of Dickens and Trollope updated for the age of Thatcher, Blair and Brexit.

It is that word Brexit, which so preoccupies and divides Britain today.

Following the referendum of 2016, the country's politicians

have signally failed to chart a consensual course out of the European Union. So, how does the

divided, polarized landscape look to a novelist? And our artists ultimately better able than

either politicians or journalists to make sense

of the big picture that lies behind the ceaseless flow of news and information. Well, Jonathan Coe joins me

now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you. Your latest novel is called Middle England Now, it's not just about Brexit, but Brexit sits at the centre of the story. Was that by design and intent, or is it simply that you couldn't avoid it, even if you'd wanted to?

I think with the kind of novel I'd already told myself that I was going to write, there was no avoiding Brexit. It's a novel which features characters from two of my earlier books, The Rotters Club and the Close Circle. Closed Circle was published in 2004, so I hadn't written about these characters for 12 years. They'd been at the back of my mind. And I always say that when I put the final full stop on a novel, then the characters are kind of dead to me, and I don't think about them again. But that hadn't happened with these particular characters, particularly the central one, Benjamin Trotter. And I'd started to think that I wanted to revisit them. I wanted to put them in contemporary Britain and see how they were getting on. I knew they'd be in their mid-50s by now.

So those thoughts were kind of floating through my mind in the early months of 2016.

And then, you know, we had David Cameron called the referendum. The referendum took place.

Everything changed. The government went into meltdown. And, you know and suddenly, if I was going to write about

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