books in order

Beryl Bainbridge Books In Order

Novels

  1. A Weekend with Claude (1967)
  2. Another Part of the Wood (1968)
  3. Harriet Said (1973)
  4. The Secret Glass (1974)
  5. The Bottle Factory Outing (1974)
  6. The Dressmaker (1974)
  7. Sweet William (1976)
  8. A Quiet Life (1976)
  9. Injury Time (1977)
  10. Young Adolf (1978)
  11. Winter Garden (1980)
  12. Watson’s Apology (1984)
  13. Filthy lucre (1986)
  14. Forever England (1987)
  15. An Awfully Big Adventure (1989)
  16. The Birthday Boys (1991)
  17. The Dolphin Connection (1991)
  18. Something Happened Yesterday (1993)
  19. Every Man for Himself (1996)
  20. Master Georgie (1998)
  21. According to Queeney (1999)
  22. The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (2011)

Omnibus

  1. Omnibus (1989)

Collections

  1. Watson’s Apology, Mum and Mr. Armitage (1985)
  2. Mum and Mr. Armitage (1985)
  3. Collected stories (1988)
  4. Ox-Tales:Air (2009)

Anthologies edited

  1. Unnatural Causes (1986)
  2. Northern Short Stories Vol 5 (1994)

Non fiction

  1. Scott’s Last Expedition (1980)
  2. English Journey (1984)
  3. Scott’s Last Journey (1999)
  4. Front Row (2005)

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Beryl Bainbridge Books Overview

Another Part of the Wood

‘Penguin Decades’ bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling. Joseph decides to take his mistress and son, together with a few friends, to stay in a cabin in deepest Wales for the weekend with absolutely disastrous results. Beryl Bainbridge’s gift for deadpan dialogue and spare narrative, and her darkly comic vision of the world, are all in evidence in this early novel.

Harriet Said

Beryl Bainbridge’s evocation of childhood in a rundown northern holiday resort.

The Bottle Factory Outing

Freda and Brenda spend their days working in an Italian run wine bottling factory. A work outing offers promise for Freda, and terror for Brenda, passions run high on that chilly day of freedom, and life after the outing never returns to normal.

The Dressmaker

If Liverpool in 1944 was grim for Rita and her aunts Nellie and Margo, Rita knew that life in America was gay and rich she’d seen it in the movies. So when a GI came to call, she was sure that love and escape would follow. But Nellie knew different the boy would have to go.

Sweet William

A novel about men, love and fidelity.

A Quiet Life

In the shabby, cluttered confines of their small house in an English seaside village just after World War II, a family of genteel poverty struggles daily, unremittingly, with itself. To escape the endless quarrel, the romantically disappointed mother spends half the night reading novels in the railway station, while the melancholy father weeps in front of the radio. The fifteen year old daughter sneaks off after dark to meet a German P.O.W. in the woods, and her brother, Alan, through whom we experience the domestic nightmare, suffers the family he tries to ignore and cannot alter, at least not until it has been destroyed.

Young Adolf

In this hilarious and ingenious novel set in 1912, Young Adolf Hitler, age twenty three, comes to Liverpool, penniless, traveling with false papers, and perpetually stalked by imaginary enemies. His half brother, Alois, who works as a hotel waiter and a salesman, has convinced him to assist in building a commercial empire based on the newly invented safety razor. Adolf moves in with Alois, his Irish wife, and their infant son and promptly inconveniences them: He is difficult, depressed, lies for days on the sofa, bungles the simplest jobs, and has not yet found himself. In episodes of disarming comedy, at every turn Young Adolf becomes involved in ludicrous and embarrassing situations, so much so that he would never, for the rest of his life, mention his laughably awkward visit to England. Taking on one of history’s odder incidents with her considerable imagination and wicked sense of humor, Beryl Bainbridge makes Adolf Hitler as absurd a figure in words as Charlie Chaplin made him on film.

Watson’s Apology

After nearly thirty years of marriage, a Victorian clergyman, John Selby Watson, bludgeons his wife to death one Sunday afternoon after church. In this compelling tale by award winning novelist Beryl Bainbridge, the seemingly ordinary history of their marriage unfolds until it climaxes in a sudden brutal act and a headline grabbing trial. As true to the documented facts of this actual case as to the workings of her singular imagination, Bainbridge artfully reveals what history withholds: the motives, feelings, and insanity that drive the Watsons to their domestic tragedy.

An Awfully Big Adventure

It is 1950 and the Liverpool reporatory theatre company is rehearsing its Christmas production of Peter Pan, a story of childhood innocence and loss. Stella has been taken on as assistant stage manager and quickly becomes obsessed with Meredith, the dissolute director. But it is only when the celebrated O’Hara arrives to take the lead, that a different drama unfolds. In it, he and Stella are bound together in a past that neither dares to interpret.

The Birthday Boys

Chronicles the doomed South Pole expedition of Captain Scott, in a fictionalized account of courage, human endurance, and suspense. By the author of An Awfully Big Adventure. NYT. PW.

Every Man for Himself

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize For the four fraught, mysterious days of her doomed maiden voyage in 1912, the Titanic sails towards New York, glittering with luxury, freighted with millionaires and hopefuls. In her labyrinthine passageways are played out the last, secret hours of a small group of passengers, their fate sealed in prose of startling, sublime beauty, as Beryl Bainbridge’s haunting masterpiece moves inexorably to its known and terrible end.

Master Georgie

The highly acclaimed New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 1998 and Booker Prize Nominee that reinvents the historical novel from Beryl Bainbridge, the distinguished author of The Birthday Boys and Every Man For Himself. A misadventure in a brothel links the destiny of the enigmatic George Hardy, a surgeon and amateur photographer, to a foundling who becomes his obsessively devoted maid, a wily street boy who takes advantage of his sexual ambiguity, and his alternately philosophical and libidinous brother in law in this terse, searing novel that takes them from the comfortable parlors of Victorian Liverpool to the horrific battlefields of the Crimean War.

According to Queeney

Bainbridge’s brilliantly imagined, universally acclaimed, Booker Prize longlisted novel portrays the inordinate appetites and unrequited love touched off when the most celebrated man of eighteenth century English letters, Samuel Johnson, enters the domain of a wealthy Southwark brewer and his wife, Hester Thrale. The melancholic, middle aged lexicographer plunges into an increasingly ambiguous relationship with the vivacious Mrs. Thrale for the next twenty years. In that time Hester s eldest daughter, the neglected but prodigiously clever Queeney, will grow into young womanhood. Along the way, little of the emotional tangle and sexual tension stirring beneath the decorous surfaces of the Thrale household will escape Queeney s cold, observant eye. A dark, often hilarious and deeply human vision…
a major literary accomplishment. Margaret Atwood, Toronto Globe and Mail…
at the end of this luminous little novel…
we feel two losses…
the personal one and the loss to civilization. Richard Bernstein, New York Times Dialogue and descriptions subtly and skillfully convey a sense not only of the period but also the personalities. Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times Bainbridge s most accomplished novel so far. Washington Post Book World Majestically deft…
. Absolutely wonderful. Kirkus Reviews starred

English Journey

Beryl Bainbridge sets out to find England by retracing J.B. Priestly’s famous English Journey. Using the conventions of great British travel writing, Bainbridge, with the skills of a fine novelist, updates to the present Priestly’s classic Depression era journey to the heart and soul of England.

Front Row

With an outstanding introductory essay, one of the greatest living English novelists has assembled her writings, essays and reviews about the theatre to provide a highly individual view of contemporary theatre and actors.

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