John Barlow Books in Order

John Barlow was born in 1967 in Gomersal, a village in West Yorkshire near Leeds. The Yorkshire he knew growing up keeps turning up in his books, sometimes through family ties and local business, sometimes through the darker pressures of crime. He writes fiction and nonfiction, and has also worked as a journalist, translator, and ghostwriter.

Before books, he spent several years working as a cabaret musician.

Barlow later studied English Literature at Cambridge University and completed postgraduate research into language acquisition at the University of Hull. He taught at university level for several years. In 2004, he left teaching and moved to A Coruña in Galicia, Spain, to write full time, a change that also deepened his interest in the food and daily life of northern Spain.

His first published fiction was the novella Eating Mammals, which won the Discovery, or Plimpton, Prize in 2002. It later became the title piece in Eating Mammals, a collection of three novellas. These odd, earthy stories involve an extreme eater, a winged cat, and a romance between pie makers, bringing together folklore, food, and dark humor.

The subject matter stayed delightfully offbeat.

With Intoxicated, Barlow moved into nineteenth-century Yorkshire. The novel follows an industrial family whose plans are disrupted by Rodrigo Vermilion and the idea for Rhubarilla, a temperance soft drink. It is a large, comic story about money, advertising, drinking, social change, and the chaos that follows a very persuasive outsider.

Food became the focus in Everything But the Squeal, a memoir-like travelogue of Galicia. Barlow follows the region’s pork-centered cooking through markets, kitchens, festivals, and long meals, while giving readers a lived-in view of the place he made home. It is curious, funny, and sometimes gloriously excessive, with the food always tied to the people preparing and sharing it.

His later fiction leans more directly into crime. What Ever Happened to Jerry Picco? introduces a disgraced Berkeley professor turned unlicensed investigator on the trail of a missing adult-film actor. The LS9 novels then shift to Leeds and John Ray, a businessman trying to stay apart from his crime-boss father’s world. The cases in Hope Road, Father and Son, and The Communion of Saints combine local criminal networks, family history, and pressure from parallel police investigations.

Barlow returned to Leeds for the Joe Romano books, beginning with Right To Kill and followed by To the Grave. Romano is a detective who takes cases seriously even when the victims are easy for others to dismiss, and his partnership with Rita Scannon-Aktar gives the investigations a sharp human edge. Across the bibliography, Barlow often comes back to food, money, loyalty, and people dealing with the consequences of the past.

Outside fiction, Barlow has continued to work in journalism, translation, and collaborative art projects, including Headless. His books have appeared in several languages, but his stories repeatedly come back to a few durable things: Yorkshire, difficult families, appetite in all its forms, and the trouble that starts when somebody decides the usual rules do not apply.