David Lodge Books in Order

Completing Lodge's trilogy of memoirs, this volume looks back on six decades of writing, teaching and travel, mixing behind the scenes stories about his novels with frank reflections on fame, failure and the practical business of earning a living by words.

This second memoir covers the years when novels like Small World and Nice Work turned Lodge from a busy academic into a full time writer, charting the role of luck, persistence and family life in that uneasy transition.

In this first memoir, Lodge traces his journey from a wartime childhood in south London through grammar school, university and early teaching, showing how Catholic upbringing, post war social change and literary ambition shaped the novels that followed.

A collection of essays about writers and writing, this book brings together Lodge's portraits of figures such as Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and H G Wells, using their lives to explore how biography, criticism and fiction overlap.

A two handed play adapted from Thinks, focusing on the charged conversations between Helen, a widowed novelist, and Ralph Messenger, a provocative cognitive scientist, as their debates about consciousness, love and morality slide into something more dangerous.

A biographical novel about H G Wells, following the ageing writer as he looks back on his explosive literary career, his political hopes and the many complicated love affairs that both energise and unsettle him.

Recently retired linguistics professor Desmond Bates is drifting through late middle age, frustrated by his worsening deafness, his energetic wife's success and an elderly father who will not accept help, when a needy young student threatens to upend what remains of his orderly life.

Part literary memoir, part criticism, this book uses the writing and reception of Author, Author as a springboard for essays on Henry James and other novelists, examining how stories move from first idea to finished book and how they fare in the world.

Compiled for Penguin's anniversary Pocket Penguins series, this slim volume selects some of the funniest and most telling episodes from Lodge's campus novels, offering a quick tour of Rummidge lecture halls, conferences and staff rooms.

Centred on Henry James's disastrous attempt to conquer the London stage, this novel follows his friendships, rivalries and private doubts, offering a sympathetic, quietly comic portrait of an artist who sees his best work misunderstood in his own lifetime.

Linked essays that ask how fiction represents consciousness, from inner monologue to shifting viewpoints, using close readings of novelists from Dickens and James to modern writers to show how narrative techniques shape our sense of the mind on the page.

At a provincial university, grieving novelist Helen Reed takes up a writer in residence post and is drawn into the orbit of Ralph Messenger, a charismatic cognitive scientist and notorious womaniser, as their conversations about mind and morality slide toward dangerous intimacy.

Novelist Adrian Ludlow is living quietly under the Gatwick flight path when his screenwriter friend, furious about a savage newspaper profile, draws him into a risky plan to take revenge on the interviewer, forcing Adrian to weigh privacy against the temptations of publicity.

Lodge's first collection of short fiction gathers eight stories written across four decades, including the title tale of a man who refuses to leave his bed, with most pieces circling themes of sex, faith, ageing and the small absurdities of everyday life.

A wide ranging collection of essays in which Lodge reflects on his own working methods, the writers who influenced him, the uses of biography and the rise of creative writing courses, always with an eye on how criticism connects to the actual business of making fiction.

This short volume in the Penguin 60s series gathers a small sample of Lodge's fiction in a compact format, giving a quick taste of his comic eye for changing manners, unexpected desire and the small crises that arrive with holidays and good weather.

Middle aged sitcom writer Laurence Tubby Passmore appears successful yet is dogged by knee pain, depression and a failing marriage, and finds little help in assorted therapies until an obsession with Kierkegaard sends him on a literal and spiritual journey back to his first love.

Fifty short, lively chapters explain key techniques of fiction, from point of view and unreliable narration to symbolism and interior monologue, each illustrated with a passage from a classic or modern novel and written for general readers rather than specialists.

Set on a residential creative writing course in the English countryside, this play brings together bestselling author Maude, one hit wonder Simon and visiting American novelist Leo as professional rivalries, flirtations and doubts about why anyone writes begin to boil over.

Bernard Walsh, a former priest turned religious education teacher, escorts his difficult father to Hawaii to visit a dying aunt and soon finds himself juggling family secrets, questions of faith and an unexpected late flowering romance in the supposed island paradise.

These essays use the ideas of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, especially dialogism and the novel as a polyphonic form, to shed light on nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, while also gently testing how far such theory really helps working critics and readers.

Set in 1980s Rummidge, this novel pairs feminist English lecturer Robyn Penrose with hard pressed factory manager Vic Wilcox on an industry shadowing scheme, turning their clash of class, politics and gender into a sharp, surprisingly warm story about work and changing Britain.

An anthology edited by Lodge, this reader collects substantial extracts from major twentieth century literary theorists, arranging them to help students trace how ideas about language, culture and power reshaped the study of literature.

Collected essays and reviews from over two decades, many sparked by invitations to comment on particular books, films or trips, in which Lodge links everyday observation to his own fiction and shows how a professional novelist keeps the muscles of writing in constant use.

Continuing the Campus trilogy, Small World follows Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp and a host of new academics around an increasingly frantic circuit of international conferences, where job offers, affairs and a young scholar's quest for an elusive woman play out like a modern romance.

A set of essays and reviews that introduces structuralist approaches to nineteenth and twentieth century literature, explaining concepts such as metaphor and metonymy and showing how they can illuminate individual poems, novels and critical debates.

Published in the United States under this title, this is the same story as How Far Can You Go, following a circle of English Catholics from youth into middle age as they navigate marriage, parenthood, changing doctrine and the fading fear of hell.

This comic yet serious novel tracks a group of English Catholic friends from student days in the early 1950s into middle age, as marriage, contraception, illness and Vatican II force them to rethink what obedience, sin and salvation might mean in modern life.

A study of modern literature that uses the contrast between metaphor and metonymy to explore realism, modernism and postmodernism, asking what shapes shifts in literary fashion and how style, narrative technique and history interact.

The first Campus novel introduces shy English lecturer Philip Swallow from gloomy Rummidge and flamboyant American critic Morris Zapp from sunlit Euphoria, whose six month job swap sends each into the other's campus, marriage and culture with comic, sometimes unsettling results.

This large reader, edited by Lodge, gathers influential essays on modern literature from across the twentieth century, giving students an accessible way into changing schools of criticism from formalism and psychoanalysis to Marxism and beyond.

A collection of essays on fiction in which Lodge assesses contemporary novelists and critics, reflects on choices facing the modern novelist, and sketches his own developing views on language, realism and narrative technique.

A concise critical study that introduces the life and work of Evelyn Waugh, tracing how his comic early novels, wartime experiences and Catholic faith feed into books like Decline and Fall, Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy.

Timothy Young grows up in wartime and austerity London, then spends a transformative summer with his older sister in postwar Heidelberg, where American affluence, German scars and first sexual experiences pull him out of his sheltered, anxious adolescence.

An edited casebook for students of Jane Austen's Emma, bringing together classic essays and more recent critical approaches, with an introduction from Lodge that maps how readers' views of the novel have changed over time.

Lodge's first major critical book argues that close attention to language is central to understanding the English novel, combining theoretical discussion with detailed readings of writers from Jane Austen and Dickens to Henry James and Kingsley Amis.

This short monograph offers an overview of Graham Greene's career, outlining the major novels, their mix of thriller and moral inquiry and the role of Catholic belief and doubt in shaping his characters and plots.

Over one hectic day in 1960s London, Catholic graduate student Adam Appleby tries to work on his thesis while worrying that his wife may be pregnant again, producing a fast moving comic portrait of faith, contraception and literary ambition.

Drawing on Lodge's own National Service, this novel follows conscripts Jonathan Browne and Ginger Brady through the petty humiliations, friendships and moral compromises of army life, showing how two years in uniform can warp a young man's sense of time and purpose.

Set around a south London cinema in the 1950s, this first novel interweaves the lives of Roman Catholic parishioners and other locals, using their trips to the pictures to probe changing morals, class tensions and the pull between faith and the modern world.