Bournville

In the Birmingham suburb of Bournville, site of a famous chocolate factory, a family celebrates VE Day in 1945. As the country struggles to understand the war it has just endured, six more national celebrations follow: coronations and football matches, fairy-tale weddings and royal funerals. As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from wartime nostalgia to James Bond and coronavirus, one pressing question starts to emerge: have these milestone celebrations brought the family - and their country - closer together, or left them more adrift and divided than ever before?

From one of Britain's best-loved novelists comes a story for our times, a story that is by turns unsettling and profoundly moving, brutally funny and brilliantly true.