Tom Baker Books in Order

If you want the life story first: Who on Earth is Tom Baker? → How to Walk Through a Door
If you want his darkest, funniest fiction: The Boy Who Kicked Pigs
If you want Tom Baker's Doctor on the page: Doctor Who Meets Scratchman
If you want a quick sampler: Who on Earth is Tom Baker? → The Boy Who Kicked Pigs → How to Walk Through a Door

Tom Baker was born in Liverpool on January 20, 1934, and grew up in a poor but close Catholic family. His father worked as a steward in the Merchant Navy, his mother worked as a barmaid and cleaner, and aunts, uncles, and cousins helped make those early years feel lively rather than bleak. During the Second World War he stayed in Liverpool with his mother, collected shrapnel, and remembered the period less as pure fear than as a strange, intense kind of childhood drama.

School was not really his thing.

At 15 he joined the De La Mennais Brothers, a religious order, and spent several years in monastic life. It was a serious commitment, and for a while he threw himself into it. Later he wrote about those years with a mix of affection, sharp memory, and disbelief. Faith, ritual, discipline, boredom, and disappointment all stayed with him, and those threads run quietly through his memoirs.

When he left the order at 21, National Service followed. In the Royal Army Medical Corps he was first put in charge of a medical museum that hardly anybody visited, which left him long stretches of time to read. That mattered. Books became company, boredom turned into fuel, and the habit of shaping life into story seems to have deepened there.

After the army he trained as an actor and worked his way through repertory theatre, television bits, and long patches of uncertainty. He joined the National Theatre in the late 1960s, caught the eye of Laurence Olivier, and won a breakthrough screen role as Rasputin in Nicholas and Alexandra. A few years later, while doing building-site work between acting jobs, he was cast as the Fourth Doctor in Doctor Who. That seven-year run made him one of the defining faces of the series.

And it changed the rest of his life.

Baker's writing grew out of the same restless storytelling instinct that drove the performances. During a quieter spell in his acting career, he taught himself to use a word processor and began writing down his own life. The result was Who on Earth is Tom Baker?, a memoir that moves from Liverpool childhood to monastery life, struggling actor years, and the strange business of becoming Doctor Who. Readers tend to love it because it sounds exactly like him on the page, funny, confiding, unpredictable, and just a little wild. Years later he returned to memoir with How to Walk Through a Door, a later-life book full of work stories, old friendships, Soho memories, aging, and the oddness of living so long in public.

His fiction is smaller in number but easy to remember. The Boy Who Kicked Pigs is a dark comic fable about a truly dreadful boy, and readers usually warm to it for exactly that reason: it is gleeful, nasty, fast, and never tries to behave. His Doctor Who fiction also carries that same mix of mischief and menace. Across his books, a few things keep turning up: outsiders, authority figures, old fears, death jokes, religious shadows, and the strange dignity of people who never quite fit. A later generation also came to know him through his narration for Little Britain, which suited that unmistakable voice perfectly. After a period living in France, he and his wife Sue settled back in England, and in recent years he has lived quietly in East Sussex with Sue and their animals, still impossible to confuse with anybody else.