Jonathan Coe’s finest fiction consists of riotous comedies or scalpel-sharp satires about British lives and the state of the nation. The Birmingham-born writer’s 1994 breakthrough novel, The Winshaw Legacy, set during the Thatcher era, charted the lurid excesses and the rapacious exploits of an upper-class family “the meanest, greediest, cruelest bunch of back-stabbing bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth.” His 2013 thriller-farce, Expo 58, explored national identity in the postwar years through characters caught up in “a frenzy of head-scratching and soul-searching around that maddening, elusive topic of ‘Britishness.’”