Jonathan Coe for Lessons in Harmony

Jonathan Coe is coming to Topping & Company Booksellers on Tuesday 17 November for a reading session. He's touring his latest novel, Lessons in Harmony, which is set in 1907 Belle Époque Paris and centres on the composer Maurice Ravel and his pupil Ralph Vaughan Williams. It follows their cross-channel friendship as the shadow of war approaches, so if you've got a thing for early twentieth-century France or the history of classical music, this is right up your street.

Coe is a big name in British fiction, with fifteen novels to his credit. You might know him from What a Carve Up!, The Rotters' Club, Middle England, or The Proof of My Innocence. He's picked up a fair few awards along the way, including the Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Européen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger, and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. He's also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

There's a bit of high praise attached to him, too. Nick Chuter has called him "probably the best English novelist of his generation," and Samantha Harvey described him as "one of the most distinguished living writers in France." Whether those labels land or not, the evening is a straightforward literary event: Coe reading from the new book in a room full of people listening.

It's on Tuesday 17 November, starting at 7pm, with doors opening at 6.30pm. Topping & Company Booksellers is at 1 Museum Street, York YO1 7DT, just opposite York Minster.