Over a career spanning six decades, David Lodge has become one of Britain's best-loved and most versatile writers. If you're thinking of starting to read his books, here is a guide for where to begin.
First published in 1975, this comic 'Tale of Two Campuses' tells the story of two academics on a six-month cultural exchange, swapping homes and lives. Philip Swallow, a British amateur academic, and Morris Zapp, an American top-ranking professor don't appear to have much in common at first but soon adapt to their new environments. It does not take long before both sundrenched Euphoric State university and rain-kissed university of Rummidge are a hotbed of intrigue, lawlessness and broken vows...
This novel is a brilliant comic satire of academia, religion and human entanglements. First published in 1965, it tells the story of hapless, scooter-riding young research student Adam Appleby, who is trying to write his thesis but is constantly distracted – not least by the fact that, as Catholics in the 1960s, he and his wife must rely on 'Vatican roulette' to avoid a fourth child.
This memoir offers fascinating insight into his life. The only child in a lower-middle-class London family, 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.
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. Writer’s Luck a candid and entertaining guide.
Published in 2011, this novel follows the life of one of the most famous British twentieth-century writers. 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 and 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.
