Newsletter

Reading lists

9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

Books by David Lodge on a blue background

David20Lodge.jpg

Where to start reading David Lodge

A Memoir 1992-2020

Varying Degrees of Success

The new memoir from one of Britain’s best loved writers

Lodge is the best British novelist never to have won the Man Booker prize

One of the leading writers of his generation

As an account of the period, Varying Degrees of Success is continuously engaging... glimpses of the ambition and energy required to fuel the final stretch of his near 60-year career as the most dependable of novelist-critics.

David Lodge (CBE)’s novels include Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work (shortlisted for the Booker) and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages. 
 
He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

In a career spanning six decades, David Lodge has been one of Britain's best-loved and most versatile writers. 
 
 With Varying Degrees of Success he completes a trilogy of memoirs which describe his life from birth in 1935 to the present day, and together form a remarkable autobiography. He describes the highs and lows of being a professional creative writer in several different genres, his extensive travels around the world, and the hope and desire of writers to make a significant and positive impression on their readers and audiences. 
 
Varying Degrees of Success provides the reader with a privileged insight into the working practices and the creative life of a major British novelist. 
 
'Continuously engaging... Glimpses of the ambition and energy required to fuel the final stretch of his near 60-year career as the most dependable of novelist-critics' New Statesman 
 
'Lodge is the best British novelist never to have won the Man Booker prize' The Times

A Memoir: 1976-1991

Writer's Luck

David Lodge’s frank and illuminating memoir about the years where he found great success as a novelist and critic.

A wonderfully candid and insightful account of a writer's life: astute, unpretentious and humane.

One of the greatest storytellers in existence and a master of suspense… [Lodge] combines an analytical, scientific way of looking at life…with a vivid, poetic imagination… a uniquely honest record of a successful English novelist’s life. There is more truth about the literary life in this book than you will find in a thousand doctoral theses, or a million promotional interviews with famous writers. Or most memoirs. It is a true gem

Irresistible… One of the fascinations of the memoir is the variety of critical techniques that are shown… this fleshed-out diary is curiously addictive

An absorbing account… endearing, and…revealing… at no point…has [Lodge] betrayed his roots by giving in to the temptations of literary grandeur… authentic

‘A wonderfully candid and insightful account of a writer’s life’ William Boyd 
 
Luck, good or bad, plays an important part in a writer’s career. 
 
 In 1976 Lodge was pursuing a ‘twin-track career’ as novelist and academic but the balancing act was increasingly difficult, and he became a full-time writer just before he published his bestselling novel Nice Work. 
 
Readers of Lodge’s novels will be fascinated by the insights this book gives – not only into his professional career but also more personal experience, such as his growing scepticism of his Catholic religion and the challenges of parenting. Anyone who is interested in learning about the creative process and about the life of a writer will find Writer’s Luck a candid and entertaining guide.

Consciousness and the Novel

A major collection of linked essays on how the great novelists – Dickens, James, Roth, Amis – go about representing human consciousness on the page

The professor, the critic and the novelist work in harmony to provide a valuable tutorial on modern fiction

A fascinating survey of how novels convey our thoughts

The abandonment of civilized talk about literature by the ‘theory’ fraternity would leave us very short if it were not for the likes of Lodge, the quality of whose prose and insights, not least because they both come matured from the casks of his own vocation, is a high treat. Leave consciousness to the neurophysiologists and philosophers, and explore human experience and selfhood with Lodge and the novelists, and enjoy

Lodge is a clear writer, wise about things and a careful reader and in general kind even to people who plainly irritate him

He excels when he writes about books. His wide learning and through understanding of critical trends give confidence and enthusiasm to his work

Lodge’s animating spark is his sedulousness, his ability to marshal the facts, pronounce a judgement and then subtly qualify it

Consciousness and the Novel makes a bright, instructive introduction to David Lodge – as critic and novelist – for anyone who does not know his work

Most other critics would make heavy weather of such topics, but Lodge always scintillates

[Lodge] gives fresh perspectives of fellow writers and an enthralling way to read much of the twentieth-century novel

David Lodge (CBE)’s novels include Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work (shortlisted for the Booker) and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages. 
 
He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

'The professor, the critic and the novelist work in harmony to provide a valuable tutorial on modern fiction' Observer 
 
How does the novel represent human consciousness on the page? 
In eleven sparkling essays on some of the great novelists of the last 200 years – from Charles Dickens to Martin Amis, Henry James to Philip Roth – David Lodge pursues this question with characteristic verve and wit. One of the best novelists and critics of his generation, Lodge is the perfect guide to look afresh at the mysterious workings of the creative mind.

Secret Thoughts

A play based on David Lodge's acclaimed novel Thinks...

Masterly... The story of an argumentative, and erotic, campus encounter between a philandering cognitive scientist and a recently bereaved novelist... an impassioned intellectual and emotional duel

On THINKS: "David Lodge yokes together two warhorses, the campus novel and the novel of adultery, and uses them to pull an old debate - the rival claims of science and art - to tell the truth about life

Lodge's wit... like that of Wodehouse, froths around and out of characters

One of the leading comic writers of his generation

Helen Reed, a novelist in her early forties, still grieving for her husband who died suddenly a year before, is a visiting teacher of creative writing at a university where Ralph Messenger, a cognitive scientist with a special interest in Artificial Intelligence and an incorrigible womaniser, is director of a prestigious research institute. 
 
He is an atheist and a materialist; she is a Catholic who has lost her faith but still yearns for the consolations of religion. Ralph is attracted to Helen and she, in spite of her principles, to him. They argue about the nature of human consciousness, and the different ways it is examined in science and literature, as she resists with weakening resolution Ralph's efforts to seduce her. 
 
David Lodge has distilled the story of his acclaimed novel Thinks... to create a witty and absorbing drama about a moral, emotional and intellectual struggle between two exceptional people.

The Man Who Wouldn't Get Up and Other Stories

Shrewd, funny and delightfully entertaining, this is the first collection of short stories from one of Britain's finest novelists and critics

His down-to-earth stories have a nice blend of the worldly and the ingenious.

David Lodge's short stories are as witty and surprising as his novels

Fresh and timely...well-observed collection that one wishes was twice as long

Lodge’s preoccupations in these stories tend to be masculine, though not exclusively. The stories deal with the tumult and mysteries of relationships in a style at once serious and farcical… This collection shows Lodge at his most playfully imaginative.

The first collection of short stories from one of Britain's finest novelists and critics 
 
A nameless man who has fallen out of love with life, refuses to get out of bed, with unexpected consequences. A sociologist recalls how he learned his first and formative lesson about the oppressive power of capitalism selling newspapers and magazines up and down the platforms of Waterloo station. Some years before the era of the Pill and the Permissive Society, four university friends travel to the Mediterranean for their first holiday together, where the climate is sultry and sex is on everyone’s mind. And a strong-willed young woman defies adverse circumstances to pursue the perfect wedding at all costs. 
 
These are some of the characters that populate David Lodge’s shrewd, funny and delightfully entertaining short stories, collected here for the very first time. What prompted their publication in this form is a short story in itself, told by the author in his Foreword. 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE 2017

The Picturegoers

The first novel from one of Britain's best loved writers

The Picturegoers' appeal derives as much from the quality of the writing as for its absorption in a bygone way of life

An excellent first novel... He has a wonderful eye for the tawdriness of our commercial world

Welcome to the Palladium, Brickley. Once the grandest music-hall south of the river, now its peeling foyer is home to stale popcorn, a depressed manager, and a cast of disparate picturegoers who touch and shape each other’s destinies. 
 
Amongst them is Mark, the cynical intellectual who seeks sensuality and finds spirituality; Clare, his girlfriend, who loses faith and discovers passion; Father Kipling, the scandalized priest; and Harry, the sexually frustrated Teddy boy. 
 
In his astutely observed first novel, David Lodge ushers in a congregation of characters whose hopes, confusions and foibles play out alongside the celluloid fantasies of the silver screen.

A Memoir: 1935-1975

Quite A Good Time to be Born

A memoir from one of Britain's finest novelists and critics.

What one takes away from this half-memoir is the self-portrait of an extraordinarily good, wrongly modest man; a distinguished scholar, and one of the finest of current novelists

As a piece of reportage from the third quarter of the English 20th century this is a sociologist’s paradise

An outstanding memoir... Lucid and witty

Quite a Good Time to be Born is a record of success, free of boasting or malice. Anyone with some knowledge of academia or the literary world will find it full of interest

To call it quite a good book would definitely be an understatement

A fascinating portrayal of a writer’s development and a perceptive account of the changing society he lived in

This is a must-read for any die-hard fan… I’m looking forward to the sequel already

The book I’d most like to be given for Christmas’ ‘criminally underrated as a writer

A revealing account of a novelist’s growth and of a brilliant mind freeing itself from the fetters of religion and social disadvantage.

[Lodge] captures a period of change when bright but ordinary children enjoyed life-changing opportunities that their parents could only have dreamt of.

Evocative memoir… The exhaustive details of the revolutions in criticism, the novel and Eng Lit are illuminating…and the influential role Lodge has played in their development.

'I drew my first breath on the 28th of January 1935, which was quite a good time for a future writer to be born in England...’ 
 
The only child in a lower-middle-class London family, David Lodge inherited his artistic genes from his musician father and his Catholic faith from his Irish-Belgian mother. Four years old when World War II began, David grew to maturity through decades of great social and cultural change - giving him plenty to write about. 
 
Candid, witty and insightful, Quite a Good Time to be Born illuminates a period of transition in British society, and charts the evolution of a writer whose works have become classics in his own lifetime.

Lives in Writing

A collection of essays on writers and writing by the Booker-shortlisted novelist and critic.

Lodge is a clear, sceptical writer, wise about things and a careful reader and in general kind even to people who plainly irritate him

Lodge, too original a writer to set down a conventional autobiography, re­veals himself in fragments, an anecdote here, a recollection there. The collection, then, is a kind of trick: portraits of others disguising a book about himself... This is a hybrid work, well-suited to its hybrid author – rooted in fact but entranced by fiction

The shrewd, amused intellect that Lodge brings to bear makes this collection a consistent pleasure… Wise and genial

Generous but discriminating, lucid without sacrificing complexity

Few readers care much about literary criticism, other than their own. Lodge cares, though, and he’s marvellous at it: genuinely engaged, funny and clever in all the pieces in this new collection

It’s not surprising that these essays exude expertise but Lodge’s enthusiasm, as he approaches 80, is infectious too. I smiled while reading them, buzzing with inspiration and disputatiousness, as Lodge reminded me why I love some writers and gave me impetus to discover new ones

Offers some typically insightful observations into the lives and work of fellow writers

Invaluable, and splendidly open-minded... For Lodge, writing is profession, preoccupation, recreation, passion – as far as the reader can tell, everything

Amusing, thoughtful and exquisitely engineered, this book is a delight

A quiet revelation that should be a set text for all pen wielders

[Lodge] is a scholar of rare sympathy and subtlety

Fascinating, challenging and illuminating… By turns thoughtful and humorous, erudite and affecting, this wide-ranging and enjoyable work from the Booker-nominated author of Small World and Nice Work celebrates the art of writing about others’ lives with warmth, wit, and humanity

Thoughtful and well-informed… Lives in Writing will be read long after we have forgotten the people who are the subjects of the essays

Writing about writing about writing, yes, but also humane, witty and sensible, entertaining and enlightening

An eloquent study of the interaction between life and fiction

A collection of essays on writers and writing by the Booker-shortlisted novelist and critic. 
 
Writing about real lives takes various forms, which overlap and may be combined with each other: biography, autobiography, biographical criticism, biographical fiction, memoir, confession, diary. 
 
In these thoughtful and enlightening essays David Lodge considers some particularly interesting examples of life-writing, and contributes several of his own. The subjects include celebrated modern British writers such as Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Muriel Spark and Alan Bennett, and two major figures from the past, Anthony Trollope and H.G.Wells. Lodge examines connections between the style and the man in the diaries of the playwright Simon Gray and the cultural criticism of Terry Eagleton, and recalls how his own literary career was entwined with that of his friend Malcolm Bradbury. 
 
All except one of the subjects (Princess Diana) are or were themselves professionally “in writing”, making this collection a kind of casebook of the splendours and miseries of authorship. In a final essay Lodge describes the genesis and compositional method of his recent novel about H.G.Wells, A Man of Parts, and engages with the critical controversies that have been provoked by the increasing popularity of narrative and dramatic writing that combines fact and fiction. 
 
Drawing on David Lodge’s long experience as a novelist and critic, Lives in Writing is a fascinating study of the interface between life and literature.

The story of a novel: With other essays on the genesis, composition and reception of literary fiction

The Year of Henry James

The story of a novel - with other essays on the genesis, composition and reception of literary fiction

Full of fascinating stuff... Lodge has the fineness of judgment that James himself thought indispensable

An absolutely invaluable document of the modern literary life

Lodge has fashioned a wise and provocative study...far more than the sum of its parts

In 2004, Henry James featured as a character in no less than three novels - David Lodge's Author, Author was one of them. 
 
With insightful and amusing candour, here he traces the history of his book from conception to publication, pondering the mystery - and indeed the anguish - of so many novels about James appearing at the same time. 
 
Lodge's reflections on his own creative practice are accompanied by studies of the genesis, composition and reception of key works by James himself, as well as other novelists from George Eliot to Vladimir Nabokov, and J.M. Coetzee to Graham Greene.

Occasional Essays

Write On

Novelist, critic, lecturer, reviewer, man-about-conferences, David Lodge, as both analyst and practitioner, is one of our foremost experts in the forms of fiction. He is also an uncommonly sympathetic and informed observer of the passing scene, and his penetrating vision is set in a consistently ironic frame. David Lodge's humour can be a devastating weapon, but it is continually engaging because as often as not the sniper's sights are trained on the author himself, and on the curiously mobile, cosmopolitan yet specialist world he inhabits. 
 
 
The essays and reviews collected in this volume are selected from the occasional writings over a span of twenty years, and are all prompted by an impulse - or an invitation - to "write on" some specific topic: a book, a film, an anniversary, a trip abroad. They also reflect the drive of the professional to keep writing, "to keep the muscles of composition exercised." 
 
 
The pieces collected here are designed for a wide audience, and most focus, in more or less direct ways, on Lodge's own work as a novelist. Enthusiasts will take especial pleasure in discovering sources for episodes from his novels, in tracing how reality mutates into fiction - or how on occasion, the process works the other way round.

Thinks...

Witty, elegant, and timely, David Lodge's eagerly awaited new novel is a dazzling exploration of love and deception, the enigmas of consciousness and the intricacies of the human heart.

Ralph Messenger is a man who knows what he wants and generally gets it.  Approaching his fiftieth birthday,  he has good reason to feel pleased with himself.  As Director of the prestigious Holt Belling Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester he is much in demand as a pundit on developments in artificial intelligence and the study of human consciousness - 'the last frontier of scientific enquiry'.   He enjoys an affluent life style subsidised by the wealth of his American wife, Carrie.  Known to colleagues on the conference circuit as a womaniser and to Private Eye as a 'Media Dong',  he has reached a tacit understanding with Carrie to refrain from philandering in his own back yard.This resolution is already weakening when he meets and is attracted to Helen Reed, a distinguished novelist still grieving for the sudden death of her husband more than a year ago, who has rented out her London house and taken up a post as writer-in residence at Gloucester University, partly to try and get over her bereavement.Fascinated and challenged by a personality and a world-view radically at odds with her own, Helen is aroused by Ralph's bold advances, but resists on moral principle.   The stand-off between them is shattered by a series of events and discoveries that dramatically confirm the truth of Ralph's dictum, 'We can never know for certain what another person is thinking.'

Home Truths: The Playscript

The second play in David Lodge's planned trilogy about the writing life

Adrian Ludlow, a novelist with a distinguished reputation and a book on the `A' level syllabus, is now seeking obscurity in a cottage beneath the Gatwick flight path. His university friend Sam Sharp, who has become a successful screen writer, drops in on the way to Los Angeles, fuming over a vicious profile of himself by Fanny Tarrant, one of the new breed of Rotwieler interviewers, in a Sunday newspaper. Together they decide to take revenge on the interviewer, though Adrian is risking what he values most: his privacy. HOME TRUTHS examines with wit and insight the contemporary culture of celebrity and the conflict between the solitary activity of writing and the demands of the media circus.

A Comedy

Writing Game

David Lodge’s first full-length play examines that curious fixture in the writing game where the amateurs meet the professionals – on a course in creative writing. Maude, author of nine bestsellers, and Simon, with one sensational success to his name, are veterans of this particular course: Leo, a campus-based American novelist astounded by the dilettante approach of the English, is the odd man out. 
 
The idea is to put the students under pressure, but in the converted barn that houses the tutors, professional and sexual tensions, past slights and current rivalries rapidly build to a fierce head of steam. Out of these pressures, David Lodge distils a sharply observed comedy of the problems and preoccupations of the writer as the professionals, striving to explain to enthusiastic beginners how to do it, are forced to confront an altogether trickier question: why on earth do they themselves write in the first place? 
 
Delicately probing, nimbly parodic, uncomfortably on target, Lodge’s incisive study of writers at work and at odds will bring the pleasure of recognition to all readers of fiction – and to most of those in the game.

Author, Author

A captivating new historical novel from one of our most successful popular literary novelists.

Not only does Lodge capture the kindliness and humour of the Master, but his novel is a rare portrait of friendship between men  It enlarges the spirit as well as entertaining the heart and is a really fine novel.

 perceptive and moving  marvellously illuminating

Stylistically genial and socially panoramic

In David Lodge's last novel, Thinks... the novelist Henry James was invisibly present in quotation and allusion. In Author, Author he is centre stage, sometimes literally. The story begins in December 1915, with the dying author surrounded by his relatives and servants, most of whom have private anxieties of their own, then loops back to the 1880s, to chart the course of Henry's 'middle years', focusing particularly on his friendship with the genial Punch artist and illustrator, George Du Maurier, and his intimate but chaste relationship with the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson. By the end of the decade Henry is seriously worried by the failure of his books to 'sell', and decides to try and achieve fame and fortune as a playwright, at the same time that George Du Maurier, whose sight is failing, diversifies into writing novels. The consequences, for both men, are surprising, ironic, comic and tragic by turns, reaching a climax in the years 1894-5. As Du Maurier's Trilby, to the bewilderment of its author himself, becomes the bestseller of the century, Henry anxiously awaits the first night of his make-or-break play, Guy Domville ... Thronged with vividly drawn characters, some of them with famous names, others recovered from obscurity, Author, Author presents a fascinating panorama of literary and theatrical life in late Victorian England, which in many ways foreshadowed today's cultural mix of art, commerce and publicity. But it is essentially a novel about authorship - about the obsessions, hopes, dreams, triumphs and disappointments, of those who live by the pen - with, at its centre, an exquisite characterisation of one writer, rendered with remarkable empathy.

Deaf Sentence

A brilliant, elegiac novel of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.

Lodge is the best British novelist never to have won the Man Booker prize… A novel as quietly witty as its title.

When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the purposeful routine of the academic year, and has lost his appetite for research. 
 
His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort and househusband, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his eighty-nine-year-old father, an ex dance musician who stubbornly refuses to move from the house he is patently unable to live in with safety. 
 
But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke. It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman whose wayward and unpredictable behaviour threatens to destabilise his life completely. 
 
Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a brilliant account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.

A Man of Parts

A moving, funny and masterful novel about the life of H.G. Wells - writer, thinker, lover and man of genius.

This is his best book in years: sprawling, funny, touching, a near-perfect fusion of story and scholarship

Excellent... scrupulous and scholarly... It bounds along terrifically

Lodge's robust approach, his insights, energy and humour, enable him to present HG as a man not only for his own times but also for ours

David Lodge's novel goes straight to the heart of the story... It is pure fun

A clever kind of half-genre, somewhere between fiction and fact, very much back in vogue with British writers ...funny and powerful

Curiously engrossing. Its power is cumulative: there are no flashes of startling moments, just a slow unfolding of friendships and feuds, plots and counter plots

The artistry is considerable... the style is clear , light and graceful (Wellsian, even); yet there is often a great deal of spade work behind the scenes... He invents entire scenes very believably

I read it with entire interest and enjoyment, and learned a lot about H. G. Wells

Lodge is to be congratulated for having filled [Wells's affairs] in with the relevant novelistic detail... It is a testimony to Lodge's powers that even a reader familiar with, frankly, the ins and outs of Wells's life will have trouble picking out the novel's imagined moments

[Lodge's] Wells is a complex, humane figure, driven by a mixture of rebellion against stultifying Victorian values, belief in a better was of shaping society and callous, hypocritical self-interest.  It's an intriguing study of a time when many of the values that are bulwarks of our society were in their infancy

A racy...account of a life lived against the mainstream which makes one long to read Wells again

An interesting experiment and well suited to a subject who does have quite a bit of explaining to do

A treat of a read, not least because of the wonderful, rolling ease with which Lodge writes. Or, rather, with which it reads - prose like this does not come without effort.

Sex-charged whopper on the life and works of HG Wells

Colourful characters and outrageous events abound. Confident, pacy writing keeps the reader wondering what Wells will get up to next and pondering the complex relationships to which he seems addicted

Very, very good.... So confidently are facts and flights of imaginative fancy interwoven that readers will find themselves unwilling - and unable - to distinguish between the two

Consistently absorbing and enjoyable.  I doubt whether a better way could have been found to bring the phenomenon that was H. G. Wells to life

Biographical fiction is on an upswing, to judge by this lively novel, faithful to the facts but free to interpret feelings

A Man of Parts has the lovely, loquacious qualities that typify eccentric wonders such as The War of the Worlds and The History of Mr Polly. David Lodge reminds us that Wells, an imperfect man, is still a worthy witness to his own world and to those worlds that may yet to come.

Lodge understands the Edwardian literary and political scene extremely well, and traces Wells's entanglements with the louche world of Fabians and free lovers with real intimacy

As protean, elusive but compelling as it's hero, David Lodge's bio-novel about HG Wells breaks all the rules but still grips the reader - like Wells himself

A wry, racy and absorbing biographical novel

Lodge knows how to tease the inner man out from behind the historical figure, subjecting Wells to probing interviews throughout the book in which his deeper beliefs and contradictions are laid bare

This fictionalised version of HG Wells dramatises the author's life, which was full of politics, writing and women

David Lodge's HG Wells was both a visionary and a chancer; as arrogant as he was insecure; with as many noble goals as base instincts; a mass of very human contradictions; as Lodge has it, a man of parts

A MAN OF CONTRADICTIONS. 
A MAN OF PASSION. 
A MAN OF THE FUTURE. 
 
Sequestered in his blitz-battered Regent's Park house in 1944, the ailing Herbert George Wells, 'H.G.' to his family and friends, looks back on a life crowded with incident, books, and women. Charting his unpromising start as a draper's assistant to his rapid rise to fame as a writer with a prophetic imagination, his immersion in socialist politics and his belief in and practice of free love, A Man of Parts is an astonishing novel of passion, ambition and controversy.

The Campus Trilogy

A trio of dazzling novels revolving around the University of Rummidge and the eventful lives of its role-swapping academics, all introduced by the author.

Lodge's wit... like that of Wodehouse, froths around and out of characters.. hugely enjoyable

Clever enough to confirm him as one of the leading comic writers of his generation

'One of the very best English comic novelists of the post-war era' Time Out 
 
The plot lines of The Campus Trilogy, radiating from its hub at the redbrick University of Rummidge, trace the comic adventures of academics who move outside familiar territory. Beginning in the late 60s Changing Places follows the undistinguished English lecturer Philip Swallow and hotshot American professor Morris Zapp as they exchange jobs, habitats and eventually wives. Small World sees Swallow, Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the beautiful Angelica Pabst jet-set about the international conference scene, combining academic infighting and tourism, esoteric chat and romance. And finally, the feminist lecturer Robyn Penrose swaps the industrial novel for a hard hat in Nice Work as she shadows the factory boss Victor Wilcox. Sparks fly when their beliefs and lifestyles collide.

Ginger, You're Barmy

A funny, shocking novel about the trials and traumas of British post-war National Service.

Vivid, funny, and with a compassion made all the more moving by the harshness of its military setting

Has the ring of complete authenticity...the mingling of horror and farce are all brilliantly evoked

Engaging slapstick...the Woody Allen of contemporary English fiction

An authentic picture of the sordid futility of National Service... I found the total recall agreeably unnerving

National Service has rarely been better evoked... an extremely well-told, well-organised story

The novel is stuffed with a dawning sense of class hatred, a sudden awareness that 'an archaic world of privilege' exists even in the bright new dawn of Robbins-principle meritocracy

Lodge's vignettes of army life are spiced with a wit that is both droll and mordant, and his characters are deftly rendered...Lodge's novel is a moving glimpse of a world on the cusp of a change: Janus-faced, profound above all in its uncertainties.

When it isn't prison, it's hell. 
 
Or at least that's the heartfelt belief of conscripts Jonathan Browne and Mike 'Ginger' Brady. For this is the British Army in the days of National Service, a grimy deposit of post-war gloom. An endless round of kit layout, square-bashing, shepherd's pie 'made with real shepherds' and drills is relieved only by the occasional lecture on firearms or V.D. The reckless, impulsive Mike and the more pragmatic Jonathan adopt radically different attitudes to survive this two-year confiscation of their freedom, with dramatic consequences

The Practice of Writing

An entertaining volume of essays, perfect for aspiring writers and curious readers.

Sends the reader back to writers' works (including Mr. Lodge's own) with a renewed appreciation of what makes them tick and why

These essays, so easy in manner, so well-built and informative, offer a fine blend of creative writing and criticism... The essays on writers who have meant most to him as a novelist, notably Graham Greene (on whom nobody has written better) and Joyce, are brilliant

Mr. Lodge's meditations on Joyce, Nabokov and Kingsley Amis, are indeed small gems, the sort of essays you want to underline and commit to memory

It is refreshing to be reminded that those who teach can also do

In this absorbing volume, David Lodge turns his incisive critical skills onto his own profession, salutes the  great writers who have influenced his work, wonders about the motives of biographers, ponders the merits of creative writing courses, pulls the rug from under certain theoretical critics and throws open the curtains on his own workshop.

The Art of Fiction

A collection of David Lodge's articles from the Independent on Sunday and the Washington Post

Exciting...a book for starting up trains of thought or discussion... It did make me think, as a writer, as a reader, as a teacher

Here is scholarship made human... There has been no better populist study of fiction since Forster's Aspects of the Novel

It is wonderful to be clued in to some of the magic tricks of the trade; the point of view, the stream of consciousness, the use of names, the sense of place, time-shift and intertextuality

Lodge has the knack of wearing his scholarship lightly... One finds here precisely that expansive, humane wisdom which is so sorely lacking in much narrow-minded modern criticism.... He gets to the bottom of things, telling us why we read fiction....admirers will find in The Art of Fiction concentrated essence of Lodge

These essays are as fresh and as readable as ever

In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. 
 
He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

David Lodge

The first of the hilarious novels in the campus trilogy, Changing Places is a funny and wise tale of academic ill-manners - David Lodge at his comic best. 
 
When Philip Swallow and Professor Morris Zapp participate in their universities' Anglo-American exchange scheme, the Fates play a hand, and each academic finds himself enmeshed in the life of his counterpart on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Nobody is immune to the exchange: students, colleagues, even wives are swapped as events spiral out of control. And soon both sundrenched Euphoric State university and rain-kissed university of Rummidge are a hotbed of intrigue, lawlessness and broken vows... 
 
‘One of the funniest but – much more importantly – one of the most truthful of postwar British novelists’ Jonathan Coe

David Lodge

Books by David Lodge

Articles featuring David Lodge

9 absorbing novels with an academic setting

Where to start reading David Lodge

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter