With a language that is both complicit and witty, blending personal anecdotes with England's recent history, Jonathan Coe presents us with a complex, ironic, engaging and highly relevant novel; a fierce social and political critique disguised as a mystery. Phyl is a young literature graduate, returned to live with her parents, frustrated by the narrow horizons of provincial English life and a dreadful job in a Japanese restaurant at Heathrow Airport. Additionally, her plans to become a writer are not going anywhere. That is, until an old friend of her mother's, Christopher Swann, shows up with his adopted daughter Rashida, who soon becomes a close friend of Phyl's. Chris reveals that he is investigating a murky think tank, the Processus Group, founded in Cambridge in the1980s and consisting of a group of fanatics wanting to push the government increasingly to the right. This sparks Phyl's imagination and she begins to write what looks like a typical British thriller novel. Meanwhile, as Britain finds itself under the leadership of Liz Truss, which will last only seven weeks, Chris continues his investigation and travels to the heart of the country, the Cotswolds, where a conference is being held that is useful to his research. When Phyl learns of a mysterious death, she suddenly sees real life blending with the novel she is trying to write. But is the solution really in contemporary politics, or in an old literary enigma?