'The Campus Trilogy' contains three brilliantly comic novels revolving around the University of Rummidge and the eventful lives of its role-swapping academics.

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.

Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and the rest are bound to lose their spiritual innocence as well as their virginities on the journey between university in the 1950s and the marriages, families, careers and deaths that follow. On the one hand there's sex and then the pill, on the other there is the traditional Catholic Church. In this razor-sharp novel, David Lodge exposes the pressures that assailed Catholics everywhere within a more permissive society, and voices their eternal question: how far can you go?

Everything changes when Timothy s glamorous older sister, Kath, invites him to spend the summer at Heidelberg. Kath, who left home long ago to work for the American army, introduces her sixteen-year-old brother to a lifestyle that is deliriously fast, furious and extravagant. Dazzled by the indulgent habits of the American forces, but at the same time sensitive to the broken spirits of the German community beneath this sparking surface, Timothy will find that his summer holiday is in more ways than one an unforgettable rite of passage."

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."

When Vic Wilcox (MD of Pringle's engineering works) meets English lecturer Dr. Robyn Penrose, sparks fly as their lifestyles and ideologies collide head on. What, after all, are they supposed to learn from each other? But in time both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other's worlds -- and about themselves.

A successful sitcom writer with plenty of money, a stable marriage, a platonic mistress and a flash car, Laurence Tubby Passmore has more reason than most to be happy. Yet neither physiotherapy nor aromatherapy, cognitive behaviour therapy or acupuncture can cure his puzzling knee pain or his equally inexplicable mid-life angst.
As Tubby s life fragments under the weight of his self-obsession, he embarks on a picaresque quest for his lost contentment."

Bernard Walsh, agnostic theologian, has a professional interest in heaven. But when he travels to Hawaii with his reluctant father Jack, to visit Jack's dying, estranged sister, it feels more like purgatory than paradise.
Surrounded by quarrelling honeymooners, a freeloading anthropologist and assorted tourists in search of their own personal paradise, and with his father whisked off to the hospital after an unfortunate accident, Bernard is beginning to regret ever coming to Hawaii. Until, that is, he stumbles on something he had given up hope of finding: the astonishing possibility of...

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...