num_pages: 160
description: From its title on, Sue Townsend's short, utterly entertaining novel is full of jokes both sly and slapstick. The Coventry of the title is one Coventry Dakin, the novel's narrator, and a devoted, intelligent, but intensely bored wife and mother maintaining her dull husband and two nearly-grown children in suburban Midlands. Coventry also just killed her neighbor, a jerk named Gerald Fox who's been spreading nasty (and false) rumors about her. Now she's on the lam, and Townsend, author of the well-loved Adrian Mole series of books, takes us down and out on a comic excursion into London, where Coventry, now a penniless fugitive, seeks protection with both the lowest and highest levels of British society.
language: English
title: Rebuilding Coventry
titlecomplete: Rebuilding Coventry
genres: 20th Century, Novels, Crime, Comedy, British Literature, Fiction, Contemporary, Humor
ratings_count: 1011
places: London Bridge, London, England
publisher: Soho Press