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Goldsboro Books

The Coup

The Coup

by John Updike

Publisher Knopf

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  • Hardcover


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    All of our books that have a dust wrapper are covered in clear protective, removable film and are packed professionally in bubble wrap and a box for shipping so that they reach you in perfect condition.

  • Book Condition & Notes

    All of our books that a have dust wrapper are covered in clear protective, removable film and are packed professionally in bubble wrap and a box for shipping so that they reach you in perfect condition.

About the book

John Updike's new novel describes violent events in the imaginary African nation of Kush - a large, landlocked, drought-ridden, sub-Saharan country led by Colonel Hakim Flix Ellello. Colonel Ellello has four wives, a silver Mercedes, and a fanatic aversioncultural, ideological, and personalto the United States. But the U.S. keeps creeping into Kush, and the repercussions of this incursion constitute the events of the novel. The time of the novel is more or less that of the last year of Richard Nixon's presidency, with flashbacks to the Eisenhower era. Colonel Ellello tells his own story, sometimes in the third person.

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About the Author

John Updike

John Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.


Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His most famous work is his "Rabbit" series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and the novella Rabbit Remembered), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1982) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) were recognised with the Pulitzer Prize.


He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due".

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GPSR EU Safety Information

1. Manufacturer Contact Information

Goldsboro Books Ltd - 23-27 Cecil Court, London, WC2N4EZ, enquiries@goldsborobooks.com, 02074979230

2. EU Authorised Representative Information

Easy Access System Europe - Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia, gpsr.requests@easproject.com

3. Safety Warnings

Not applicable

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