Spoils of War Books in Order

The Spoils of War books are a later branch of Fay Weldon’s Dilberne family saga, but they feel looser, stranger, and more openly mischievous than the Edwardian trilogy. If Love & Inheritance shows a great house trying to hold itself together, these novels show what happens to the descendants, hangers-on, and hidden heirs after the old rules start to fray. Bloodline still matters. So do money and looks. But the tone is darker, and the comedy has more bite.

Before the War begins in 1922 with Vivvie, a rich, awkward young woman who knows beauty is a currency she does not possess. Too tall, too plain, and painfully aware of how the world judges women, she decides to take charge of her future in the most practical way she can. Around her stands one of Weldon’s great monsters, her selfish and socially gifted mother Adela, already familiar from the earlier Dilberne books. Their battle gives the novel its force.

Beauty has a price here.

The interwar setting matters a lot. London is changing, old titles still carry weight, new ideas jostle with old snobberies, and private damage keeps slipping out into public life. Vivvie’s story is about marriage and class, but also about parental cruelty, self-invention, and the slow realization that being chosen is not the same thing as being loved. Weldon keeps the tone light on the surface and ruthless underneath.

After the Peace makes a bold jump forward to modern Britain and a very different heroine. Rosalind, known as Rozzie, is born on the first day of 2000 and grows up believing one story about her parentage, only to discover another. Her connection to the Dilberne line comes through an old fertility decision and a hidden piece of family history. What follows is part mystery, part revenge comedy, and part reflection on what inheritance means once science, secrecy, and class mobility have scrambled the old certainties.

Even with the gap in time, the books speak to each other. Both ask who gets the good fortune, the good looks, the right name, the right story. Both are full of women who refuse to stay in the place assigned to them. And both keep returning to a very Weldon question: what exactly do families pass down besides money? Shame, certainly. Fantasies too. Sometimes damage. Sometimes resilience.

So although Spoils of War stretches across decades, it never feels baggy. It feels pointed. These are family novels about legitimacy, appearance, resentment, and the odd routes by which power survives. Readers who like dynastic fiction but want something brisker, funnier, and more ironic will feel very much at home.