The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

By the same author

The Accidental Woman

A Touch of Love

The Dwarves of Death

What a Carve Up!

The House of Sleep

The Rotters’ Club

The Closed Circle

The Rain Before It Falls

The Terrible Privacy of

Maxwell Sim

JONATHAN COE

VIKING

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2010

Copyright © Jonathan Coe, 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted

The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall: copyright © 1970, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, reproduced by kind permission of Hodder and Stoughton Limited.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book.

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Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-670-91894-2

Man is a lever whose ultimate length and strength he must determine for himself.

— Donald Crowhurst, quoted in The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall

Geography no longer matters because there is no near or far, the monetary sheath enclosing the globe has destroyed the geography of distances.

— Alasdair Gray, 1982, Janine

One day I will die, and on my grave it will say, ‘Here lies Reginald Iolanthe Perrin; he didn’t know the names of the flowers and the trees, but he knew the rhubarb crumble sales for Schleswig-Holstein.’

— David Nobbs, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin

Through words, she offers us her shaming revelations.