I recently read and really enjoyed J.G. Farrell’s Troubles, about an English family in Ireland (at the time still part of the UK) just after WWI.
The movie is absolutely fabulous, too.
I like L.P. Hartley’s novels like The Go-Between, The Hireling and Eustace and Hilda. I’m not sure precisely when they are set, though, but I think they are generally around that period.
Also Jocelyn Brooke’s novels, such as The Scapegoat and The Orchid Trilogy.
Oh, also some of Elizabeth Bowen’s novels, like The Last September.
I see what you did there.
We should warn the OP that this is a crazy rambling dark funny heavily-metaphorical novel, kind of like Fawlty Towers on opium. But well worth the read.
Good catch! It is indeed an excellent read and fits the time period, but is maybe not tonally in line with what one usually associates with interwar Britain.
Not a novel, and I haven’t read it myself yet, but Robert Grave’s The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939 looks very good.
An earlier BBC Cold Comfort Farm series was also excellent…
I’ve seen Cold Comfort Farm, Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle and Molly Keane’s Devoted Ladies considered “Middlebrow Parodic-Gothic.” Three of my favorite books set in the period–I had no idea there was genre! Although the time period of Cold Comfort Farm was actually a later 20th century–in which there had been no Second World War; film versions just set it in the 1930’s…
If fiction from earlier in the century is allowed, let me recommend Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. It begins in 1912 and ends some undetermined time after The Great War–but was written in the 1920’s and considered a modernist classic. Quite worthwhile if you expend just a little effort. As is the adaptation scripted by Tom Stoppard, just begun on BBC2 and coming to HBO next year…
Thanks again everyone! I have read Cold Comfort Farm and I Capture the Castle, will try Devoted Ladies. And the description of Troubles doesn’t, er, trouble me, sounds great. As do all of these.
Roughly the first half of Richmal Crompton’s Just William series would fit the bill.
G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown series.
Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series.
I got this from the library to get ready for the BBC show and was surprised how much I like it. I had only read the first 150 pages when I saw the first episode and that also inspired me to keep reading. Now I’m 750 pages in (out of 900) and quite glad I expended that little effort. I will have to see the last 4 episodes before I can weigh in on Stoppard’s adaptation, but so far it’s fascinating to see what he’s chosen to distill from that massive book down to 6 hours of TV.
Helen Forrester’s autobiographical trilogy of life in Depression era Liverpool.
Anything by Monica Dickens (Charles Dickens’ granddaughter).
John Buchans, 39 Steps, a bloody good read even now.
I adore this book! I can’t figure out why every movie made of it has to screw it up! The plot and the hero are so clever-- I wish someone would put it on the screen just the way it was written. I had hopes for the TV version that came out recently, but no-- they tried to “improve” it. It doesn’t need improving.
I’ve long thought that myself .
oooh, good thread!! 
try some of Georgette Heyer, while better known of writing Regency Romance novels (which she invented!) she wrote murder mysteries and some are from that era.
*From Publishers Weekly
Although her contemporaries Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh got more attention, Heyer (1902-1974) also was an important pioneer in the mystery field. When she wasn’t writing her more famous historical romances, Heyer turned out several sharp and satirical mysteries such as this one, which in many ways is as bracingly modern as the film Gosford Park in its treatment of life above and below stairs in a posh country house. *
“Miss Heyer’s characters and dialogue are an abiding delight to me… I have seldom met people to whom I have taken so violent a fancy from the word ‘Go.’”
Dorothy L. Sayers