Wilt Books in Order

The Wilt series is Tom Sharpe’s long‑running chronicle of Henry Wilt, a mild, underpaid lecturer whose attempts to keep his dignity intact invariably plunge him into scandal. Across five novels—Wilt, The Wilt Alternative, Wilt On High, Wilt In Nowhere and The Wilt Inheritance—Sharpe follows Henry’s progress from demoralised teacher at a fenland technical college to reluctant head of a university department, forever at the mercy of bureaucracy, his formidable wife Eva and the dogged but dim police inspector Flint.

In the first book, Wilt, Henry teaches literature to classes of bored apprentice tradesmen while enduring Eva’s fads and bullying cheerfulness at home. He copes by fantasising about murdering her, but a disastrous party with their new American acquaintances leaves him shackled to an inflatable sex doll and humiliated. When he tries to dispose of the doll as a kind of rehearsal for an imaginary crime, a mix‑up convinces Inspector Flint that Eva has been murdered. Interrogations, misunderstandings and a building site full of evidence send the case spiralling into farce as Wilt, who knows he is innocent, must out‑think the authorities without revealing just how sordid the whole misunderstanding really is.

The Wilt Alternative finds Henry slightly more secure as head of a reconstituted Liberal Studies department at the Fenland College of Arts and Technology, though he has little real power. His professional life is now dominated by ideological turf wars, educational fashions and officious administrators, while at home Eva has embraced every organic and “alternative” craze she can find and their quadruplet daughters view the world with ferociously literal teenage logic. When Wilt stumbles into a terrorist siege, he becomes a pawn for both international extremists and heavy‑handed anti‑terror police, forcing him to improvise wildly to protect his family and the few liberal values he still believes in.

In Wilt On High, drug dealing and voyeurism rumours cast a shadow over the college. Wilt’s colleagues suspect him of informing on them, while Inspector Flint is convinced that Henry must somehow be at the centre of whatever is going wrong. What begins as an accusation about peeping in the wrong staff lavatory escalates through bureaucratic investigations, botched sting operations and military paranoia into a full‑scale confrontation at a nearby US airbase, with Wilt once again stuck squarely in the line of fire.

Wilt In Nowhere pushes the series into a more international frame. When Eva arranges a family trip to visit wealthy relatives in Atlanta, Wilt is so horrified by the idea of flying across the Atlantic and being trapped with loud American in‑laws that he slips away on a solitary walking holiday. A blow to the head leaves him unconscious in the back of a stranger’s truck, and when he eventually resurfaces he is entangled in a lurid local scandal involving arson, sexual misbehaviour and media frenzy. Meanwhile, Eva and the quadruplets find themselves at the centre of a drug‑trafficking investigation in the United States, generating headlines and diplomatic headaches that inevitably draw Inspector Flint back into Wilt’s orbit.

Finally, The Wilt Inheritance catches up with Henry as a weary middle‑aged academic and notional head of the Communications department at the newly minted Fenland University. Crushed by paperwork, terrified by the school fees of his scheming daughters and still henpecked by Eva, he reluctantly accepts a lucrative summer job tutoring the gun‑obsessed son of a randy aristocrat. The arrangement promises financial salvation but instead detonates a chain of misunderstandings, crimes and cover‑ups that drag in the police, the press and the local gentry. Throughout the series Sharpe uses Wilt’s misadventures to savage everything from education policy and health care to terrorism scares and class privilege, while keeping the tone rooted in knockabout farce and bitter, exasperated laughter.