Lynne Truss Books in Order

This collection gathers Truss’s columns from The Times, Woman’s Journal, and The Listener. The pieces circle around cats, singledom, procrastination, daily irritations, and the kind of small absurdities she can make surprisingly funny.

Set on the Isle of Wight in 1864, this comic historical novel gathers Alfred Tennyson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll, and other Victorians into one crowded summer. Art, vanity, friendship, and social awkwardness all get their turn.

A writer working on a book about literary doubles agrees, improbably, to let someone else take over her life while she retreats upstairs. From there, Truss spins a strange, fast comic novel about identity, obsession, and lives slipping sideways.

A short nonfiction portrait of Alfred Tennyson and the people around him, told through paintings and early photography. It is part literary background, part visual history, and especially rewarding if you enjoyed Tennyson’s Gift.

Truss makes a funny, surprisingly passionate case for punctuation, from apostrophes to semicolons. Mixing language history, examples, and stickler fury, it explains why tiny marks can change meaning more than most people think.

A light, witty look at fifty years of British television, built from Truss’s reflections on the medium and its personalities. It works as a quick tour through TV culture, nostalgia, and the strange habits of viewers.

Truss’s first novel turns a struggling gardening magazine into the scene of an escalating farce. Office frustrations, fake readers’ letters, and bruised private lives tangle together until everyone seems headed for the same comic collision.

This collection brings together twelve radio monologues about men and women in midlife. Funny, sad, and sharply observed, the pieces focus on relationships, family roles, and the private stories people tell themselves.

Truss turns from punctuation to manners, asking why everyday life can feel so rude, distant, and impersonal. It is part social gripe, part comic essay collection, and sharper than its cheerful title lets on.

This picture book uses apostrophes to show how tiny marks can change a sentence completely. With Bonnie Timmons’s illustrations, it makes grammar visual, silly, and surprisingly easy to remember.

The first run of these radio capers drops you into 1950s Brighton, where Inspector Steine thinks crime has been beaten for good. Constable Twitten and Sergeant Brunswick know better, especially with Mrs Groynes quietly running things nearby.

Another playful punctuation picture book, this time widening the lesson beyond commas and apostrophes. Truss and Bonnie Timmons show how marks on the page can change sense, rhythm, and the entire joke.

Crime has dried up, which suits Inspector Steine just fine and drives Mrs Groynes mad. This second radio series sends Twitten and Brunswick through stage shows, school schemes, and fresh seaside trouble as the criminal machinery starts up again.

Sent into the world of sport despite not being a natural fan, Truss writes with equal parts curiosity and alarm. These essays ask why sport matters so much, and why watching it can make sensible people miserable.

Constable Twitten takes more of the lead in this third set of radio adventures. Back from Scotland Yard, he finds Brighton full of new schemes, old grudges, and the same awkward truth, Mrs Groynes may be the sharpest operator in town.

A bereaved librarian receives a folder of odd materials about a talking cat named Roger, and soon realizes they connect to his wife’s death. What starts as grief and curiosity turns into a darkly funny gothic mystery.

This companion to Cat Out of Hell reaches back into the Captain’s past, mixing eighteenth-century voyages, ambitious cats, and stranger forces than any sane reader asked for. It is funny, eerie, and larger in scope than it first appears.

In 1957 Brighton, clever new constable Twitten suspects the town’s crime problem is not nearly as solved as Inspector Steine believes. When theatre critic A. S. Crystal is shot in his seat, a silly-looking case opens onto a much older mystery.

A young man turns up dead in a deckchair during a bright Brighton summer, and Twitten thinks the killing leads back to a shady nightclub. Steine is distracted, Brunswick is thrilled to go undercover, and the case gets messier by the minute.

Three apparently unconnected people are killed with the same unlikely weapon, a milk bottle, and Brighton starts to panic. Twitten, Brunswick, and Steine have to sort real clues from seaside noise before the next headline lands.

Rain lashes Brighton as an escaped killer, a missing gang insider, and a death inside a department store throw the police into chaos. Twitten and Brunswick chase overlapping plots while Mrs Groynes fights to hold her place in the underworld.

Across three radio series, Truss gives voice to creatures from rock pools, garden ponds, and attic rafters. These comic monologues are full of natural-history detail, but the real fun is hearing animals sound uncannily human.