Books like The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe

The Kite Runner follows an unlikely friendship between a privileged boy and the son of his father’s servant amid Afghanistan’s turbulent history, exploring betrayal, redemption, and the father‑son bond.

Treasure Island is Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure about a boy’s coming‑of‑age journey on a ship, featuring the iconic Long John Silver and shaping modern notions of pirates, treasure maps and tropical island tales.

Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens’s 1837-39 social novel, follows an orphan raised in a workhouse who flees to London, joins a gang of pickpockets, and uncovers family secrets while exposing child labour and exploitation.

When Enid Lambert calls for a final Christmas at the family home, the aging patriarch with Parkinson’s and his three adult children—banker, screenwriter, and restaurateur—must confront their own discontent and the fractured bonds that hold the family together.

Jennifer Egan’s interlocking narratives weave the lives of Bennie Salazar, a former punk rocker turned record executive, and Sasha, a restless young woman, across decades and continents, exploring music, memory and the fragile threads that bind us.

Zadie Smith’s debut, White Teeth, blends humour and insight to explore race, immigration, family and identity across three generations in London.

Three feckless young men embark on a light‑hearted rowing holiday along the Thames in 1888, creating a series of humorous misadventures.

In the idyllic English village of Edgecombe St. Mary, retired Major Ernest Pettigrew finds unexpected companionship—and love—with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, a Pakistani shopkeeper, as they navigate friendship, loss, and cultural boundaries.

Set in 1915 Dublin, *At Swim, Two Boys* follows the growing friendship of two teenage boys against the backdrop of Ireland’s impending Easter Rising.

A young South African intellectual moves to London in the 1960s, striving to become a great and compelling poet.

Billy Carlyle is a professional fighter starting to lose. His eyes cut too easily and his friends, Gabriel, an aspiring actor, and Sam, an artist preparing for her first gallery show, try to persuade Billy to leave the ring.

*"Although this is Australian author Tsiolkas’ fourth novel, it is the first to be published in the U.S. With its raw style, liberal use of profanity and racial epithets, and laserlike focus on the travails of suburban life, it is a down-and-dirty version of Tom Perrotta’s best-selling Little Children (2004). At a barbecue in a Melbourne suburb, a man loses his temper and slaps the child of the host’s friends. This incident unleashes a slew of divisive opinions, pitting friends and families against each other as the child’s parents take the man to court. Told from eight different viewpoints, the novel also deftly fills in disparate backstories encompassing young and old, single and married, gay and straight, as well as depicting how multiculturalism is increasingly impacting the traditional Aussie ethos. For good measure, the author also throws in male vanity, infidelity, and homophobia. Tsiolkas’ in-your-face style is sure to alienate some readers—the child’s parents, for example, are among the book’s most unlikable characters—but his novel, which won the 2009 Commonwealth Prize, fairly radiates with vitality as it depicts the messy complications of family life."* -- Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist

A charming historical romance about a woman who starts an amateur orchestra to boost the morale of a small English town during World War II.

On the eve of their wedding, Edward and Marian are drawn into unexpected paths while their friends face strange choices; the charismatic manservant Jackson guides them toward light, yet confronts his own pivotal decisions.

A darkly comic novel exploring the corrupting influence of politics and media in modern Britain.

Sarah is a narcoleptic who has dreams so vivid she mistakes them for real events; Robert has had his life changed for ever by the misunderstandings arising from her condition; Terry, the insomniac, spends his wakeful nights fuelling his obsession with movies; and the increasingly unstable Dr Gregory Dudden sees sleep as a life-shortening disease which must be eradicated .A group of students sharing a house. They fall in and out of love, they drift apart. Yet a decade later they are drawn back together by a series of coincidences involving their obsession with sleep - and each other...

A love story between a middle-aged man and a young woman from a partisans' family in London, set against the backdrop of the 1970s, exploring the seductive power of storytelling.

A generational sweep of LGBT friendship and British society from 1940s Oxford to contemporary England, tracing the life of David Sparsholt and his family across war, art, and changing attitudes toward homosexuality.

During wartime London, two boys, Stephen Wheatley and his friend Keith, turn their quiet street into a covert espionage arena, uncovering secret plots that turn a childhood adventure into a sinister reality.

A quiet, powerful tale of Henry Townsend, a former slave who rises to become a plantation owner in antebellum Virginia, and the turbulent world of his estate and the wider South as slavery persists and challenges surface.

In 1944, Adolf Hitler narrowly survives an assassination attempt. Decades later, a British professor seeks the hidden film and papers left by conspirator Axel von Gottberg and his friend, uncovering themes of friendship, betrayal, and the enduring quest for truth.

Two aspiring musicians in 1963 North Carolina navigate race, friendship, and their dreams of jazz greatness.