Note: This page is part of the Peter de Polnay project.
I found this list on the Fantastic Fiction website.
Polnay wrote 93 books in total, 15 of which were non-fiction. He also wrote short stories for magazines.
Fiction
- Angry Man’s Tale (1938) (see Neglected Books review)
- Children, My Children (1939)
- Boo (1941)
- The Magnificent Idiot (1942)
- Water On the Steps (1943)
- Two Mirrors (1944)
- A Letter to an Undertaker (1946)
- A Pin’s Fee (1946)
- The Umbrella Thorn (1946)
- The Fat of the Land (1948)
- The Moot Point (1948)
- Into an Old Room (1949)
- Out of the Square (1949)
(Short New York Times review: “A strange and sometimes beautiful book which surely can take a place on the front bookshelf of literature about Italy of the late Forties, this story moves in the twilight of fantasy without being fantastic. On the outside — modern people wandering through the public squares and private villas of a Florence shadowed by its medievalism — the narrative is fairly simple.”) - Somebody Must (1949)
- The Next Two Years (1951)
- A Beast in View (1953)
- When Time Is Dead (1954)
- Before I Sleep (1955)
- Fools of Choice (1955)
- The Shorn Shadow (1956)
- The Clap of Silent Thunder (1957)
- The Night of the Hyrax (1958)
- The Scales of Love (1958)
- A Door Ajar (1959)
(Short review from The Spectator in 1959:
“The young de Polnay won and lost a fortune in five months on the Riviera of the 1930s, when ‘it was then like a beautiful lady: nowadays it is a travel agent surrounded by a caravan site.’ Evocative of that now transmogrified place, and of that forgotten age when the King of Sweden was playing in the mixed doubles, and with a remarkable chapter on the splendours and miseries of the gaming table.”) - The Shriek of the Gull (1959)
- The Uninvolved (1959)
- The Crack of Dawn (1960)
- The Gamesters (1960)
- Mario (1961)
- No Empty Hands (1961)
(Short review from Encounter magazine: “This popular writer’s new novel is the story of a Catholic’s spiritual conflict. It is his deepest and therefore most important book.” - The Flames of Art (1962)
- A Man of Fortune (1963)
- The Run of Night (1963)
- Three Phases of High Summer (1963)
- A Home of One’s Own (1964)
- The Plaster Bed (1964)
- As the Crow Flies (1965)
- In Raymond’s wake (1965)
- The Centre-Piece (1966)
(Short review at The Spectator: “Mrs Harriet Visser Long is an American millionairess who is sixty-five, but who tells everyone that she is fifty and `thereafter had to appear fifty.’ If Peter de Polnay’s entertainment, called The Centre-Piece, has a tragic side, it is the picture drawn of an ageing woman keeping up a pretence and clinging to the memory of herself as great hostess with a succession of lovers. The present story revolves round a dinner-party which she gives in Paris, and the summoning of her guests provides the author with an opportunity to portray not only a series of witty character sketches, but to offer some telling observations about what exactly it is that goes to make an expatriate.”) - Not the Defeated (1966)
- A Winter’s Promise (1967)
- The Second Death of a Hero (1968)
- The Patriots (1969)
- Tower of Strength (1969)
- Napoleon’s Police (1970)
- Permanent Farewell (1970)
- Spring Snow and Algy (1970)
- Tale of Two Husbands (1970)
- T.-shaped World (1971)
- Life of Ease (1971)
- Caroline’s Way (1972)
- The Moon and the Marabou Stork (1972)
- The Grey Sheep (1972)
- The Loser (1973)
- Price You Pay (1973)
- Indifference (1974)
- The Crow and the Cat (1974)
- The Scrapheap (1974)
- The Chains of Pity (1975)
- Blood and Water (1975) (see Neglected Books review)
- Clump of Trees (1976)
- None Shall Know (1976)
- The Stuffed Dog (1976)
- Make Believe (1977)
- Driftsand (1977)
- Other Shore of Time (1978)
- It’s Cold Next Door (1978)
- Autumn Leaves Merchant (1979)
- The Talking Horse (1980)
- A Stone Throw (1981)
- Minor Giant (1981)
- Sea Mist (1982)
- Of Venison and Victims (1983)
- Other Self (1983)
- The Lost Stronghold (1984)
- Guest House (1985)
- The Dog Days (1986)
Non-fiction
- Death and To-morrow (1942) (see also a review on the Salvete atque Valete! blog )
- Germans Came to Paris (1943) (See Kirkus review)
(Also, a short review by Robert Gale Woolbert at Foreign Affairs:
“This description of life, intrigue and growing French resistance in Nazi-dominated Paris is one of the best accounts to come out of occupied France. The author is a Hungarian novelist who for a while enjoyed special privileges in the French capital.”) - Death of a Legend (1952)
- An Unfinished Journey (1952)
- Descent from Burgos (1956)
- Peninsular Paradox (1958)
- Travelling Light (1959)
- Garabaldi (1960)
- Madame De Maintenon (1960)
- A Queen of Spain (1962)
- The World of Maurice Utrillo (1967)
- Aspects of Paris (1968)
- Sarah Bernhardt (1968)
- Enfant Terrible (1969)
- Paris (1970)
- My Road- An Autobiography (1978)
Contributed to
- The true story of the Maid of Orleans (1969)
- (as translator) The Vampires of Alfama by Pierre Kast (1976)
(Short blurb found at lwcurrey.com : “Leftist historical fantasy set in eighteenth-century Europe. A vampire scientist is trying to bring physical immortality to man, to bypass the kind offered by the Church. A brilliant novel by a noted film critic, spectacular in its grotesquerie and eroticism; it boldly offers the vampire a role more aptly heroic than those subsequently popularized by such writers as Saberhagen … and Yarbro …”)