The Rotters' Club

The first book in a two-part series, the novel is set primarily in Birmingham, England, during the 1970s, a decade defined by industrial strikes, power cuts, IRA bombings, and sharp class divisions. It follows interconnected families whose lives revolve around the British Leyland car factory in Longbridge and a local school called King William's.

A brief prologue, set in Berlin in 2003, establishes a framing device. Two young people, Sophie and Patrick, meet for dinner. Sophie is the daughter of a woman named Lois; Patrick is the son of a man named Philip. Their parents once knew each other at school in Birmingham and have recently been reunited by chance. Sophie proposes to tell Patrick the story of her Uncle Benjamin, beginning in 1973, in a Britain she describes as utterly foreign to their own.

The story opens in November 1973 with the Trotter household. Colin, the father, works in industrial relations at the Longbridge plant. His wife Sheila manages the home. Their eldest, 16-year-old Lois, secretly reads personal ads in the music magazine Sounds, searching for romance. Their younger son Benjamin does homework quietly, while the precocious nine-year-old Paul reads with disdainful intelligence. Lois fixates on a simple ad, "Hairy Guy seeks Chick," and memorizes the box number.

Colin attends a dinner to promote cooperation between management and the factory's union representatives, including Bill Anderton, a senior shop steward and committed socialist. Bill is privately troubled by a mysterious cheque drawn on the factory's Charity Committee account, apparently signed by him but which he cannot remember authorizing. He suspects the committee's treasurer, Victor Gibbs, of forgery.

At King William's, Benjamin's circle takes shape. His best friend Philip Chase is earnest and artistic. Doug Anderton, Bill's son, is politically sharp. Their classmate Harding is the school's anarchic jester, and their nemesis Culpepper is a sports-obsessed snob with racist tendencies. Steve Richards, the only Black student, is talented and well-liked. Benjamin nurses an unspoken infatuation with Cicely Boyd, a beautiful girl who runs the junior drama society. Claire Newman, whose elder sister Miriam works as a typist at the Longbridge factory and has begun a secret affair with Bill Anderton, catches Benjamin's eye on the bus, but he pays her little attention.

Lois answers the personal ad and begins dating Malcolm, the "Hairy Guy," a gentle young man who introduces Benjamin to progressive rock music. At a parent-teachers evening, the Trotters meet the Chases and the two families become friends. Miles Plumb, the school's flamboyant art teacher, begins a long, unwanted campaign of infatuation toward Philip's mother, Barbara Chase.

Bill's affair with Miriam deepens dangerously. When Gibbs threatens to expose them, Bill counters with evidence of Gibbs's embezzlement. Bill also discovers that his fellow steward Roy Slater belongs to a far-right fascist group. Miriam demands Bill leave his wife Irene, but he resolves to end the affair instead. She becomes hysterical, threatening to harm herself. Days later, Miriam vanishes. Her family later receives a letter claiming she has run off with another man and is expecting his child. Claire suspects the letter may be a cover for something worse, but her strict, religious father refuses to consider this.

On November 21, 1974, Lois and Malcolm celebrate their one-year anniversary at a pub called the Tavern in the Town. Malcolm carries a diamond engagement ring, planning to propose. At 8:20 p.m., before he can ask, a bomb explodes. Malcolm is killed in the Birmingham pub bombings. Lois survives physically but is devastated, eventually requiring long-term psychiatric care.

The narrative jumps to 1976 and shifts perspectives frequently. Benjamin, quietly religious since a childhood moment when he prayed for swimming trunks and found a pair in a nearby locker, visits Lois regularly at her facility. He brings her an album called The Rotters' Club by Hatfield and the North, explaining that the title echoes their shared school nickname. During the summer, the Trotters holiday in Denmark with a German family, where Paul saves the hosts' son from drowning after local boys lure him into dangerous waters.

At school, Doug joins the editorial team of the school newspaper, The Bill Board, alongside Benjamin, Philip, Claire, and later Emily Sandys. Harding delivers a mock election speech for the National Front by simply reading a genuine fascist leaflet aloud; its phrase "the very maws of doom" lodges in everyone's memory. Philip's dream of forming a progressive rock band collapses when the other musicians revolt and start playing punk, adopting that phrase as their band name. On Bonfire Night, Paul holds up a dying sparkler and announces to Doug, "The death of the socialist dream."

Steve Richards stars as Othello opposite Cicely's Desdemona in the school production. Benjamin reviews it harshly, praising Steve but savaging Cicely's performance. A satirical letter by Harding, published under a pseudonym, implies Steve and Cicely were intimate at the cast party, causing Steve's girlfriend to leave him. Cicely, devastated, seeks Benjamin out in the editorial office, telling him his review was honest. She asks him to cut off her famous golden ponytail as a symbolic break with her old self. He does, and she gives him her phone number. Their friendship begins, though Benjamin remains psychologically paralyzed, unable to express his deeper feelings for her.

Claire, driven by the mystery of Miriam's disappearance, interviews Bill Anderton for the school paper. Afterward, she reveals she is Miriam's sister. Bill, shaken, admits he loved Miriam and concludes: "Your sister's dead. That's what I think." In a letter written years later, Emily Sandys reveals to Claire the full horror of the bombing night: After the explosion, Lois looked down and found herself holding Malcolm's severed head. This is the trauma from which Lois has never recovered.

Cicely drifts away from Benjamin, dating other men, and he begins seeing Jennifer Hawkins, an actress he once insulted in print. Benjamin is made a prefect, alienating him from his editorial friends. Steve Richards, convinced Culpepper drugged his tea during a physics exam, confronts Culpepper on the last day of school. When Culpepper uses a racist slur, Steve slams his head into a table and is expelled.

During a family holiday in Wales, Benjamin impulsively walks through a violent storm to find Cicely, who is recovering from glandular fever at her uncle's house on the Llŷn Peninsula in North Wales. Over several days, they fall in love. Cicely tells him she is leaving for New York to be with her actress mother but promises this is just the beginning. Benjamin breaks up with Jennifer, who warns him: "Hasn't anyone ever warned you about Cicely? . . . The way she chews them up and spits them out?"

The novel's final section is a single, unbroken stream-of-consciousness monologue from Benjamin, set on the afternoon of May 3, 1979, the day of the General Election that brings Margaret Thatcher to power. Sitting in a Birmingham pub, he holds a glass of Guinness and tries to stretch the moment into infinity. That morning, after Cicely's return from eight months in New York, they made love for the first time. His mind ranges across memories: visiting Steve, now working in a chip shop after his failed exams; encountering Malcolm's old friend Reg, consumed by guilt and struggling with alcohol addiction, blaming himself for suggesting the pub where the bomb went off; and Doug's journalism about police violence at an anti-fascist demonstration in Southall. Benjamin imagines a future with Cicely decades hence. Sam Chase, Philip's father, makes two predictions at the bar: that Benjamin and Cicely will be happy forever, and that Thatcher will never become Prime Minister. Both men laugh.

The epilogue returns to Berlin in 2003. Patrick tells Sophie stories never really end; all you can do is choose a moment to stop. Sophie smiles and says, "All right, then: now it's your turn," pointing toward the sequel.