Peter Dickinson Standalone Novels books in order

Reading order

Peter Dickinson’s standalone novels represent the bulk of his publishing career and cover an unusual range of subjects. For younger readers, titles like The Blue Hawk, Eva, and A Bone From a Dry Sea mix adventure with speculative ideas. Eva, published in 1988, follows a girl whose consciousness is transferred into a chimpanzee’s body after an accident. The Flight of Dragons (1979) takes a naturalistic approach to dragon mythology. For adult readers, novels like The Poison Oracle, The Lively Dead, and The Yellow Room Conspiracy offer mysteries with complex settings and unconventional structures.

Dickinson worked on the editorial staff at Punch magazine from 1952 to 1969, and his fiction shows a satirist’s eye for social class and English institutions. Later books like In the Palace of the Khans (2012) and The Green Gene (2015) prove he kept writing well into his eighties. Across 38 standalones published over more than four decades, Dickinson moved freely between genres, ages, and settings. His work has been recognized with two Carnegie Medals, two Gold Daggers, a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature, and an OBE.