RF Delderfield Books in Order

This early nonfiction book revisits memorable incidents and personalities from local English history. Delderfield writes with a newspaperman's feel for character, anecdote, and the life of a community.

Reporter Nat Hearn comes home from RAF service to a small town newspaper and finds both romance and a civic battle waiting. When corruption shadows a redevelopment scheme, journalism becomes a test of nerve.

Delderfield turns local historian here, gathering the people, incidents, and traditions of Budleigh and the surrounding district. It is affectionate, detailed, and rooted in the everyday texture of place.

An early Delderfield novel about private discontent beneath respectable English life. As old routines begin to crack, the book watches its characters with sympathy and a sharp eye for social pressure.

In this autobiographical book, Delderfield looks back on the people, work, and passing moments that stayed with him. Personal memory and a journalist's gift for observation keep the pages brisk and intimate.

This adventure novel follows seven men through the Napoleonic Wars to Waterloo. Delderfield uses their fates to show comradeship, danger, and the long strain of war from the ground up.

Delderfield imagines Ben Gunn's life before and after Treasure Island, from Devon boyhood to piracy and survival. Linked to Stevenson's world, it gives the castaway a full, rough-edged story of his own.

The residents of Manor Park Avenue face the Second World War house by house. Bombing, rationing, absence, and opportunism test old loyalties, while the street's private dramas become part of a national crisis.

Beginning in 1919, this novel follows the families of Manor Park Avenue as they rebuild after one war and drift toward another. Widowed Jim Carver and his neighbours carry the everyday hopes and hurts of suburbia.

From rural Devon to Fleet Street and war, Jan Leigh remains tied to the brilliant, difficult Diana Gayelorde-Sutton. Their story is a long romantic tug of war shaped by class, ambition, and the shocks of the century.

Young Jan Leigh's life changes when he meets Diana Gayelorde-Sutton, the headstrong daughter of a wealthy landowner in Devon. Their bond begins in childhood, but class and ambition make the future anything but simple.

During the Second World War, gentle Pedlar Pascoe and slippery Horace Pope stumble through RAF service and a string of comic misadventures. It is a wartime caper with fraud, friendship, and plenty of chaos.

Delderfield tells the story of Napoleon's marshals as men, rivals, and commanders, not just names in a campaign list. Their careers help explain both the rise of the empire and its failures.

Jan Leigh's long, difficult attachment to Diana is tested by adulthood and war. As the world darkens, ambition, class, and old loyalties keep pulling the two of them together and apart.

This anthology gathers reminiscences from West Buckland across nearly seventy years. It offers a warm, varied picture of school life, changing customs, and the communities that formed around the place.

Sebastian Sermon, a weary prep school master, suddenly walks out on his old life and heads for the Devon coast. What follows is a comic, uneasy reinvention story about freedom, desire, and middle-aged panic.

Delderfield examines Napoleon's brothers and sisters, showing how family ambition, rivalry, and dependence fed the empire around them. It is a vivid companion piece to his other books on Napoleon.

During the Peninsular War, a small British detachment is cut off behind enemy lines and forced to survive on nerve and improvisation. Delderfield turns a tight military predicament into a brisk historical adventure.

In this nonfiction book, Delderfield turns his reporter's eye on Britain, writing about places, customs, and everyday life. It is part travel book, part social portrait of the country he knew best.

Invalided home from the Boer War, Paul Craddock buys a Devon estate and tries to build a better life in the Sorrell Valley. The Edwardian years bring love, loss, and the slow remaking of a rural world.

War arrives at the Sorrell Valley, and the Craddock family is pulled into the upheavals of 1914 to 1940. Personal loyalties, grief, and national crisis reshape the world Paul thought he understood.

Thirty years after scandal drove him away, Kent Stuart returns to Redcliffe Bay to face the affair that wrecked his youth. Memory, regret, and a changed seaside town pull an old tragedy back into focus.

Delderfield recounts Napoleon's disastrous withdrawal from Russia, where cold, hunger, chaos, and relentless pressure turned retreat into catastrophe. It is military history told with a close eye for exhausted men and failing leadership.

Pip Stuart comes back to his West Country hometown after decades away, hoping to settle old ghosts. His return draws him into the remembered affair that once shattered several lives.

Part memoir, part ramble through memory, this book gathers Delderfield's childhood, schooldays, journalism, wartime service, and writing life. It also shows how places and people from real life found their way into his fiction.

This history follows Napoleon from the wreckage of the Russian campaign to the collapse of his empire in 1814. Delderfield keeps both the high politics and the exhausted common soldiers in view.

In a North Wales seaside town, bored young bank clerk Charlie Pritchard falls for the wrong woman and drifts toward a reckless bank job. Desire, blackmail, and panic turn a restless summer into something far more dangerous.

Delderfield follows Napoleon's private life from youth to exile, tracing the women who shaped, challenged, and complicated him. It is popular history with a strong eye for personality, power, and the gap between romance and ambition.

In the last Craddock novel, war and peace both remake the Sorrell Valley. Paul Craddock and his family face grief, changing land laws, and the long struggle to hold on to the life they built.

After service in the Crimea and India, Adam Swann returns to England determined to make his fortune. His rise in Victorian transport and his stormy courtship of Henrietta drive a big, energetic family saga.

This autobiographical volume looks back on Delderfield's early years, from childhood and school to his first jobs and the worlds that fed his imagination. It is a lively portrait of the making of a storyteller.

Adam and Henrietta Swann are prosperous now, but success brings fresh complications as their children grow up in the 1890s. Family ambition, business expansion, and the pressures of Imperial England pull the Swanns in different directions.

Shell-shocked after the First World War, David Powlett-Jones takes a history post at Bamfylde, a Devon public school. Teaching slowly restores him, but the years between the wars test his ideals, his loves, and the school itself.

In the final Swann saga, aging Adam Swann watches his large family and transport empire strain under new politics, new machines, and private sorrows. Victorian certainties are fading, and England is edging toward a darker century.