Stephen Fry Books In Order

A Bit of Fry & Laurie

A selection of sketches from the BBC2 comedy series starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.

Three Bits Of Fry And Laurie

A compilation of the best sketches and moments from all three of the Fry and Laurie TV series. Sketches include ‘Gordon and Stuart Eat Greek’, ‘Jeremiah Beadle’, ‘Flushed Grollings’, ‘Amputated Genitals’, ‘The Ass Kicker’s Song’ and ‘The Red Hat of Patferrick’, plus a lot of silly vox pop snippets.

The Liar

An irresistible novel by multi talented Stephen Fry, author, film and television star, playwright and newspaper columnist. ‘The spirits of Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh glower benignly over this very funny first novel…
An ingenious plot filled with surprises and glittering with hilarious, often indecent inventions.’ The New York Times Book Review ‘Transforms the sophomoric into the sophisticated.’ Los Angeles Times

The Hippopotamus

In his clever second novel, the author of The Liar introduces readers to Ted Wallace: failed poet, failed theater critic, failed father and husband, shameless womanizer, and self confessed alcoholic. When Ted invites himself to the country estate of his beautiful and mysterious godson under the pretense of writing a family history, the result is ‘a deliciously wicked and amusing little fable’ New York Times.

Making History

Those of us who have already discovered Stephen Fry know him as the brilliant British comedian behind TV series such as Jeeves & Wooster and Blackadder, and the author of two enormously funny novels, The Liar and The Hippopotamus. But his new film in which he plays Oscar Wilde and his new novel this one represent a somewhat alarming departure from his previous work: They’re more serious. Though humor is still an essential ingredient of both, Fry’s fans are finally getting to witness the emotional depth that this brilliant polymath usually keeps hidden. In Making History, Fry has bitten off a rather meaty chunk by tackling an at first deceptively simple premise: What if Hitler had never been born? An unquestionable improvement, one would reason and so an earnest history grad student and an aging German physicist idealistically undertake to bring this about by preventing Adolf’s conception. And with their success is launched a brave new world that is in some ways better than ours but in most ways even worse. Fry’s experiment in history makes for his most ambitious novel yet, and his most affecting. His first book to be set mostly in America, it is a thriller with a funny streak, a futuristic fantasy based on one of mankind’s darkest realities. It is, in every sense, a story of our times.

The Stars’ Tennis Balls

A distinct departure from his popular comic novels, this haunting, provocative tale of wrongful imprisonment and violent retribution is Stephen Fry’s first thriller. A brilliant recasting of the classic story The Count of Monte Cristo, Revenge crackles with the wit and intelligence readers have come to expect from this hugely talented author, actor, and comedian, yet it reveals an intriguingly deep, much darker side of his imagination.
Ned Maddstone is a happy, charismatic Oxford bound seventeen year old whose rosy future is virtually preordained. Handsome, confident, and talented, newly in love with bright, beautiful Portia, his father an influential MP, Ned enjoys an existence of boundless opportunity. But privilege makes him an easy target for envy, and in the course of one day Ned s charmed life is changed forever. A promise made to a dying teacher combined with a prank devised by a jealous classmate mutates bewilderingly into a case of mistaken arrest and incarceration. Drugged and disoriented, Ned finds himself a political prisoner in a nightmarish, harrowing exile, far from home and lost to those he loves. Years pass before an apparently mad, obviously brilliant fellow inmate reawakens the younger man s intellect and resurrects his will to live. The chilling consequences of Ned s recovery are felt worldwide.
While Revenge breaks new ground with its taut plotting, exhilarating pace, and underlying air of menace, its sophistication and irreverent humor are vintage Fry a gloriously rich mix that only he could deliver. His first novel in four years is a dramatic, powerful tour de force that is sure to enlarge the American audience for this singularly talented author s work.

Paperweight

A collection of the many articles that Stephen Fry has written for magazines, newspapers and radio. The volume includes selected wireless essays of Donald Trefusis, the ageing professor of philology brought to life in Fry’s novel ‘The Liar’ and the best of Fry’s weekly column for the ‘Telegraph’.

Moab Is My Washpot

A number one bestseller in Britain that topped the lists there for months, Stephen Fry’s astonishingly frank, funny, wise memoir is the book that his fans everywhere have been waiting for. Since his PBS television debut in the Blackadder series, the American profile of this multitalented writer, actor and comedian has grown steadily, especially in the wake of his title role in the film Wilde, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination, and his supporting role in A Civil Action. Fry has already given readers a taste of his tumultuous adolescence in his autobiographical first novel, The Liar, and now he reveals the equally tumultuous life that inspired it. Sent to boarding school at the age of seven, he survived beatings, misery, love affairs, carnal violation, expulsion, attempted suicide, criminal conviction and imprisonment to emerge, at the age of eighteen, ready to start over in a world in which he had always felt a stranger. One of very few Cambridge University graduates to have been imprisoned prior to his freshman year, Fry is a brilliantly idiosyncratic character who continues to attract controversy, empathy and real devotion. This extraordinary and affecting book has ‘a tragic grandeur that lifts it to classic status,’ raved the Financial Times in one of the many ecstatic British reviews. Stephen Fry’s autobiography, in turns funny, shocking, sad, bruisingly frank and always compulsively readable, could well become a classic gay coming of age memoir.

Stephen Fry’s Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music

‘Hello, I’m Stephen the Fry. Now time for the first outing of a brand, spanking new feature here on ‘The Incomplete and Utter History of Classic Music’…
putting some unsuspecting figure in music under the spotlight.’ In his ‘Incomplete & Utter History of Classical Music’, Stephen Fry presents a potted and brilliantly rambling 700 year history of classical music and the world as we know it. Along this musical journey, he casually throws in references to pretty much whatever takes his fancy, from the Mongol invasion of Russia and Mr Khan Genghis to his Friends, the founding of the MCC, the Black Death which once again became the new black in England to the heady revolutionary atmosphere of Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’ and the deep doo doo that Louis XVI got into or ‘du du’ as the French would say. It’s all here Ambrose and early English plainsong, Bach, Mozart beloved of mobile phones everywhere, Beethoven, Debussy, Wagner the old romantic, right up to the present day. Entertaining and brilliantly written, this is a pretty reckless romp of a history through classical music and much much more.

The Ode Less Travelled

I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry…
I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.
Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled

Stephen Fry believes that if one can speak and read English, one can write poetry. Many of us have never been taught to read or write poetry and think of it as a mysterious and intimidating form. Or, if we have been taught, we remember uncomfortable silence when an English teacher invited the class to ‘respond’ to a poem. In The Ode Less Travelled, Fry sets out to correct this problem by giving aspiring poets the tools and confidence they need to write poetry for pleasure.

Fry is a wonderfully engaging teacher and writer of poetry himself, and he explains the various elements of poetry in simple terms, without condescension. His enjoyable exercises and witty insights introduce the concepts of Metre, Rhyme, Form, Diction, and Poetics. Aspiring poets will learn to write a sonnet, on ode, a villanelle, a ballad, and a haiku, among others. Along the way, he introduces us to poets we’ve heard of, but never read. The Ode Less Travelled is a lively celebration of poetry that makes even the most reluctant reader want to pick up a pencil and give it a try.

QI: Advanced Banter

Have you ever wondered why most books of quotations are stuffed full of rather pedestrian quotes by people you’ve never heard of? It’s a shame because a really good quotation book, one which gathered the truest and funniest insights of the best minds, and organised them into 250 subjects, from ambition to worry, or from artichokes to woodpeck*ers, a book which offered you a useful take on almost every situation life throws at you from the death of your child’s hamster to the unified theory of everything, a sourcebook of wise one loners, of knock out jokes, of drole asides and heartfelt statements of truth and beauty, a practical handbook of interestingness , well, that would be worth having. And, guess what? Those thoughtful gentlemen at QI have come up with one. Five years of learning how to avoid the dull stuff have left the QI team in a uniquely good position to deliver this elusive holy grail: the big, useful, funny and really very good book of quotations.

Stephen Fry in America

Britain’s best loved comic genius, Stephen Fry, turns his celebrated wit and insight to unearthing the real America as he travels across the continent in his chariot of Englishness, a black London cab. Stephen Fry has always loved America. In fact, he came very close to being born here. His fascination for the country and its people sees him embarking on an epic journey across America, visiting each of its fifty states to discover how such a huge diversity of people, cultures, languages, and beliefs creates such a remarkable nation. Stephen starts his journey on the East Coast and zigzags across America, stopping in every state from Maine to Hawaii, talking to each state’s hospitable citizens, listening to music, visiting landmarks, viewing small town life and America’s breathtaking landscapes, following wherever his curiosity leads him. En route he discovers the South Side of Chicago with blues legend Buddy Guy, catches up with Morgan Freeman in Mississippi, strides around with Ted Turner on his Montana ranch, marches with Zulus in Mardi Gras in New Orleans, drums with the Sioux Nation in South Dakota, joins a Georgia family for Thanksgiving, ‘picks’ with bluegrass hillbillies, and finds himself in a Tennessee garden full of dead bodies. Whether in a club for failed gangsters in Brooklyn, New York yes, those are real bullet holes, or celebrating Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts is there anywhere better?, Stephen is welcomed by the people of America mayors, sheriffs, newspaper editors, park rangers, teachers, and hoboes, bringing to life the oddities and splendors of each locale. A celebration of the magnificent and the eccentric, the beautiful and the strange, Stephen Fry in America is the author’s homage to this extraordinary country.

The Fry Chronicles

Spanning 1979 1987, ‘The Fry Chronicles‘ charts Stephen’s arrival at Cambridge up to his thirtieth birthday. ‘Heartbreaking, a delight, a lovely, comfy book’. ‘The Times’. ‘Perfect prose and excruciating honesty. A grand reminiscence of college and theatre and comedyland in the 1980s, with tone perfect anecdotes and genuine readerly excitement. What Fry does, essentially, is tell us who he really is. Above all else, a thoughtful book. And namedroppy too, and funny, and marbled with melancholy’. ‘Observer’. ‘Arguably the greatest living Englishman’. ‘Independent on Sunday’. ‘Extremely enjoyable’. ‘Sunday Times’. ‘Fry’s linguistic facility remains one of the Wildean wonders of the new media age. The patron saint of British intelligence’. ‘Daily Telegraph’.

Mrs Fry’s Diary

Stephen Fry’s secret wife speaks out at last…
Enjoyed a nice cuppa this morning with a HobNob and Jeremy Kyle. There was a woman on there who’d been married 16 years without realising her husband was gay. Extraordinary! Which reminds me, it’s our 16th anniversary in a few weeks. What a coincidence. Stephen Fry actor, writer, raconteur and wit. Cerebral and sophisticated, a true renaissance man. Or is he? Finally, his secret double life the womanizing, the window cleaning, the kebabs, the karaoke is exclusively revealed by Edna, his devoted wife and mother of his five, six or possibly seven children. These diaries take us through a year in the life of an unwitting celebrity wife, and are rumoured to include: scandalous nocturnal shenanigans advice on childcare 101 things to do with a tin of Spam. ‘A good diary should be like a good husband a constant companion, a source of inspiration and, ideally, bound in leather.’ Edna Fry twitter. com/MrsStephenFry

Stephen Fry Does the ‘Knowledge’

Audio CD, BBC Physical Audio

The Library Book

‘Hill provides us with a reading list the equal of any degree course.’ The Times LondonIn pursuit of a book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year long voyage through her books in order to get to know her own collection again. Susan Hill is the winner of numerous prestigious literary awards. She is the author of a highly successful crime series as well as the famous The Woman in Black.