DJ Taylor Books in Order

David Castell writes in a hot eastern country while memories of Norfolk and Oxford keep breaking into his story. This layered early novel explores family myth, childhood, literary ambition, and the difficulty of separating invention from personal history.

A provocative study of British fiction in the 1980s. Taylor questions why so many novelists avoided the urgent political and social pressures of their time, and argues for fiction with a wider sense of public life.

A self-conscious contemporary novel about pornography, memory, and the slippery idea of authenticity. Its central figure, once a pornographic scriptwriter, tries to make sense of his suburban present while the story keeps questioning what counts as real.

Taylor surveys the English novel in the decades after 1945. He considers how writers responded to war, class, changing manners, politics, and the demands of a rapidly shifting literary culture.

A contemporary novel of English provincial life, where private ambitions and social standing shape everyday choices. Taylor turns a close eye on the compromises, frustrations, and quiet power struggles beneath an apparently settled community.

Six years after his financier uncle's empire collapses, George Chell is still adrift. A newspaper article forces him to revisit the London world that once captivated him and confront the financial disaster that changed his life.

Taylor's biography follows William Makepeace Thackeray from his Anglo-Indian childhood and financial losses to the success of *Vanity Fair*. It also examines his troubled marriage, family life, rivalry with Dickens, and uneasy relationship with fame.

Ted King, one half of the beloved comedy act Upward and King, looks back as a documentary revisits their career. From postwar beginnings to television fame, the novel explores partnership, memory, rivalry, and the sadness behind the jokes.

This biography follows George Orwell from Eric Blair's imperial childhood through his years as a policeman, journalist, novelist, and political writer. Taylor considers the experiences and contradictions behind books such as *Animal Farm* and *Nineteen Eighty-Four*.

After landowner Henry Ireland dies in a riding accident and his widow vanishes, another death deepens the mystery. A Victorian web of fraud, poaching, servants, natural history, and crime links the countryside to London's streets.

A social history of London's Bright Young People between the wars. Taylor follows the parties, scandals, artists, writers, socialites, and hangers-on whose Jazz Age glamour masked insecurity, excess, and lives that often ended badly.

A young American woman makes a sudden choice on a prairie journey and builds a new life across the Atlantic. Years later, Alice Keach is a glamorous London hostess, but a secret from her past threatens everything she has made.

In 1931 London, would-be writer James Ross is broke, selling carpet cleaner door to door, and falling for a secretary named Susie. Her employer's suspicious dealings pull him into the seedy, precarious life of the city's backstreets.

Taylor examines the rise and fall of amateur ideals in British sport. Moving through football, cricket, golf, tennis, schools, and literature, he asks what changed when playing for love became associated with incompetence rather than honor.

On the eve of the Victorian Epsom Derby, gamblers, burglars, detectives, social climbers, and desperate families make their plans. Their futures hinge on the champion horse Tiberius, as schemes and secrets race toward a crowded finish.

In autumn 1933, struggling writer James Ross scrapes by in Soho through odd jobs and dubious schemes. His pursuit of the elusive Gladys leads him toward a divorce plot and the growing menace of Mosley's Blackshirts.

A collection of literary parodies from the long-running column, edited and introduced by Taylor. It sends up celebrated writers, poets, critics, and biographers while offering a mischievous alternative history of modern English letters.

In an alternate 1939, Edward VIII remains king as a fascist-leaning peace movement works to weaken Britain's war effort. Magazine worker Cynthia Kirkpatrick is pulled into a dangerous London web of secrets, loyalties, and espionage.

A history of literary life in Britain from 1918 onward. Taylor explores writers, editors, critics, reviewers, universities, and publishers, showing how arguments, institutions, and media attention helped shape the books readers encountered.

Inspired by Thackeray's classic satire, this sharp guide examines snobbery in modern Britain. Taylor surveys its changing language, rituals, and social tribes, from property and politics to food, culture, and sport.

The former publicist for the Helium Kids looks back on the band's astonishing, nearly Beatles-sized rise. This bittersweet fictional music memoir follows fame, image-making, and the private tensions hidden behind a very public success.

Taylor traces the making and afterlife of George Orwell's *Nineteen Eighty-Four*. The book follows Orwell's final years, his struggle to complete the novel while ill, and the ways its ideas were claimed and debated after publication.

A group biography of Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton, and Janetta Parlade, four independent women in wartime London's literary and artistic circles. Their friendships, affairs, ambitions, and hard beginnings unfold against the upheaval of World War II.