Toby Lloyd Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Toby Lloyd is a best-selling novelist who is best known for his debut novel Fervor which he published in 2024. The author grew up in London and went to Oxford before he hopped across the pond to go to New York University where he got his MFA. The combination of his writing studies in the United States and his upbringing in the United Kingdom was what shaped who he has become as a writer and as a person. Outside of his writing, he is a regeneration and housing policy expert. At his job, he has amassed more than fifteen years of experience in campaigning, communication, strategy, and policy in voluntary, private, and public sectors. Lloyd has partnered with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and co-authored a report on how the United Kingdom government ought to respond to the downturn in the housing market.

Lloyd was brought up in West London to a loving family that had a synagogue-going Jewish mother and a culturally Christian father. Initially, he identified as an atheist but he could never get away from religion. His father had devout Christian relatives while his mother was very active in her synagogue. Meanwhile, his brother was a devout Jew who became a Bar Mitzvah and attended Hebrew school. As for Lloyd, he preferred to read about religion from authors such as Francine Prose, Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Saul Bellow. He also read a bunch of ancient texts and the bible and drew from these in the writing of his novels. While studying at Oxford University, he used to go to Chabad for Friday night lectures where he first interacted with religious Jews. When he was doing his MFA at New York University, he became a member of a Jewish group that hosted Shabbat weekends and weekly Torah studies. Toby drew on all his experiences when he was writing his novel.

As for how he got interested in reading and writing, Toby Lloyd has a very unique story. He was never a big reader when he was a child. It was not until he was a teenager that he developed an interest in books. The books he used to read during this time consisted of old penguin editions that were all over his parents’ shelves. The old books he used to read at that time ranged from Scott Fitzgerald to Graham Green, Evelyn Waugh to Iris Murdoch. He also got into big canonical stuff from the likes of Eliot, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Turgenev, and Austen. Even though he initially did not understand much of what he read, he would sometimes come across paragraphs and phrases he found fascinating. During that time, he had a strong sense that there was some hidden message for him in the books and that he would find it if only he looked hard enough. Nonetheless, he used to hate just about every book he read for much of his schooling years. The only exception was the works by Philip Larkin who he still reads to this day.

As for how he started writing his debut novel, it all comes back to the thing he initially hated with a passion – religion. A few years ago, he developed an interest in the Bible particularly the long narrative parts in Genesis and Exodus before he transitioned to the books of Samuel. As an atheist who hated anything to do with religion, the Bible was a book he had been avoiding for much of his life. He does not know what triggered his interest but once he started he just could not stop as he started thinking this is actually very good literature. His perspective of the Bible began to change as he started thinking that it was nothing like what he believed it was. Lloyd used to think the Bible was nothing but a rulebook that told people how they were supposed to think. But reading it he found that he loved the stories and found the reading experience very exciting. It was from his reading that he decided that he needed to pen something that found its inspiration from the Old Testament. He wanted something like the unsettling and baffling story of Jephthah and his daughter that he sacrificed and that is what Fervor would become.

Tony Lloyd’s novel Fervor is an unforgettable and chilling story of a London-based and very close-knit Jewish family pushed to the brink since their daughter is a suspected witch. Eric and Hannah Rosenthal live with Eric’s father Yosef who survived the Holocaust and their three children. They all believe in the literal truth of the Tanakh and the presence of evil and good in the world. Hanna is working on an account of Yosef’s year during the Nazi years including his time in the concentration camps. But then her perfect daughter Elsie starts behaving in weird ways and then following the death of her grandfather she goes missing. When she comes back she is a very different young woman. Hannah believes Elsie has explored too deep into Jewish mysticism and is now lost in the shadows. But for Tovyah, her brother, Elsie’s problem is a dysfunctional family with unbridled ambition and obsessed with empty traditions and rituals.