Anthony Quinn Books in Order

For Quinn's historical London sweep: The Streets → Half of the Human Race → Curtain Call → Freya → Eureka.
For wartime suspense: The Rescue Man → Our Friends in Berlin.
For the loosely linked Curtain Call novels: Curtain Call → Freya → Eureka.
For later social drama: London, Burning.
For football nonfiction: Klopp → Keegan.

Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964, and the city has never really left his work. He went to St Francis Xavier’s College, then read Classics at Pembroke College, Oxford, a path that gave him a lasting feel for old stories, formal voices, and the odd ways the past keeps bumping into the present.

Writing started for him in journalism. His early break was reviewing books for the newly launched Independent, and he went on to interview writers such as Lorrie Moore, Alan Hollinghurst, Sarah Waters, Richard Ford, Michael Frayn, Ian McEwan, and Martin Amis. From 1998 to 2013 he was the paper’s film critic, which helps explain why so many of his novels feel alert to scenes, entrances, lighting, and timing.

Then the critic crossed the footlights.

In 2006, Quinn served as a Man Booker Prize judge. Not long after, he began writing fiction of his own. His first novel, The Rescue Man, appeared in 2009 and won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. It goes back to wartime Liverpool, following Tom Baines, a historian of architecture who becomes a rescue worker during the Blitz.

That critic’s training matters on the page. Quinn’s novels often unfold through ensembles, with people walking in from different corners of a city until their lives start to snag on one another. He likes public places, theatres, newspapers, hotels, clubs, courtrooms, streets, but he is usually watching the private panic underneath.

Quinn's books often turn on people caught between public duty and private longing. Half of the Human Race sets a suffragist and a cricketer against the pressures of class, politics, and the First World War. The Streets moves to Victorian London, where a young reporter finds that poverty can be turned into someone else's business.

London is his other great stage.

Curtain Call begins in 1936, with actress Nina Land witnessing a murder attempt she cannot easily report. That book led into a loose chain of related novels, including Freya, about a sharp, ambitious woman journalist and her complicated friendship with novelist Nancy Holdaway, and Eureka, a 1967 film-world story full of egos, art, and bad decisions. Curtain Call later became the basis for the film The Critic, starring Ian McKellen and Gemma Arterton.

He has also written about Britain closer to living memory. Our Friends in Berlin is a wartime spy story set in blackout London, while London, Burning follows four linked lives in the late 1970s, a time of strikes, bomb scares, political strain, and punk. Quinn likes big public moments, but he tends to enter them through people with messy work, messy hearts, and a lot to lose.

Football is part of the picture too. A lifelong Liverpool supporter, Quinn turned to nonfiction with Klopp: My Liverpool Romance, a personal book about Jürgen Klopp, Liverpool F.C., and the strange grip a club can have on a family and a city. He later wrote Keegan: The Man Who Was King, following Kevin Keegan’s rise through British football.

Quinn lives in Islington. His novels keep returning to the same pleasures: crowded cities, changing times, journalists and performers, moral shortcuts, and people trying to behave well when history is making that harder than usual.