The ups, downs, and exploits of a group of British Catholics--for whom the sexual revolution came a little later than it did for everybody else...

In this bracing satire, a group of university students make their way through the fifties and into the turbulent sixties and seventies. We first meet Dennis, Michael, Ruth, Polly, and the others at the altar rail of Our Lady and St. Jude, but soon enough they get caught up in the alternately hilarious and poignant preoccupations of work, marriage, sex, and babies--not always in that order.

A satirical comedy in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh,...

"A funny, intelligent, superbly paced social comedy." --The New York Times

Vic Wilcox, a self-made man and managing director of an engineering firm. has little regard for academics, and even less for feminists. So when Robyn Penrose, a trendy leftist teacher, is assigned to "shadow" Vic under a goverment program created to foster mutual understanding between town and gown, the hilarious collusion of lifestyles and ideologies that ensues seems unlikely to foster anything besides mutual antipathy. But in the course of a bumpy year, both parties make some surprising discoveries about...

Paradise, tourist style. It's a very long way from home.

Bernard Walsh is in Hawaii on family business, escorting his querulous father to the bedside of a long-forgotten aunt. His mission transports him from quiet obscurity in Rummridge, England, to a lush tropical playground, from cloistered solitude into the unfamiliar company of package tourists: honeymooners; young women looking for Mr. Nice; families nuclear and fissile. But it is the island itself that holds the most astonishing surprises, as an accidental encounter opens up to Bernard possibilities of life, and love, never dreamed of...

Euphoric State University with its whitestone, sun-drenched campus and England's damp red-brick University of Rummidge have an annual professorial exchange scheme, and as the first day of the last year of the tumultuous sixties dawns, Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp are the designated exchangees. They know they'll be swapping class rosters, but what they don't know is that in a wildly spiraling transatlantic involvement they'll soon be swapping students, colleagues, and even wives. Changing Places is a hilarious send-up of academic life, intellectual fashion, sex, and marriage by a...

Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the lovely Angelica are the jet-propelled academics who are on the move, in the air and on the make in David Lodge s satiricalSmall World. It is a world of glamorous travel and high excitement, where stuffy lecture rooms are swapped for lush corners of the globe, and romance is in the air."

By all appearances, Laurence Passmore is sitting pretty. True, he is almost bald and his nickname in "Tubby," but the TV sitcom he writes keeps the money coming in, he has an exclusive house in Rummridge, a state-of-the-art car, a vigorous sex life with his wife of thirty years, and a platonic mistress to talk shop with. What money can't buy, and his many therapists can't deliver, is contentment. It's not the trouble behind the scenes of his TV show that's bugging him or even the persistent pain in his knee; it's this deeper, nameless unease. Is it a spiritual crisis or just one of the...

Mrs Gereth is convinced that Fleda Vetch would make the perfect daughter-in-law. Only the dreamy, highly-strung young woman can genuinely appreciate, and perhaps eventually share, Mrs Gereth's passion for her 'things' - the antique treasures she has amassed at Poynton Park in the south of England. Owen Gereth, however, has inconveniently become engaged to the uncultured Mona Brigstock. As a dramatic family quarrel unfolds, the hesitating Fleda is drawn in, yet she remains reluctant to captivate Owen, who seems as attracted to her as she is to him. Is she motivated by scruple or fear? In...

David Lodge's novels have earned comparisons to those of John Updike and Philip Roth and established him as "a cult figure on both sides of the Atlantic" (The New York Times). Thinks . . . , his witty new novel about secret infidelities and the nature of consciousness, unfolds in the alternating voices of Ralph Messenger, director of the Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester, and Helen Reed, a novelist and writer in residence at the university. Mutually attracted, the two end up in a moral standoff that is shattered by events that dramatically confirm the...

The Language of Fiction was the first book of criticism by the novelist David Lodge. In it he established a fresh approach to the appreciation of literature that focuses the reader's attention on the significance of language. This edition has a new foreword from David Lodge and includes in its entirety the comprehensive afterword from the 1984 edition.

Veteran rivals for an exclusive academic chair (recently endowed with $100,000 a year) do scholarly battle with each other in what the Washington Post Book World called a delectable comedy of bad manners . . . infused with a rare creative exuberance. From the author of the award-winning Changing Places.