No Goodness in the Worm
Gay Taylor
September 10, 2026
ISBN 9798234165152 / Paperback / 256 pages / $22.99

The first new edition in nearly a century of No Goodness in the Worm, Gay Taylor's remarkable 1930 novel.

Taylor explores the emotional consequences of a world reshaped by the First World War, asking what happens when traditional ideas of marriage, love, and gender no longer provide meaning or security. Through sharp psychological insight and unsparing wit, she examines loneliness, desire, female independence, and the struggle to form genuine human connections in a rapidly changing society.

Set against the English countryside, the novel follows Valentine as she observes friends and lovers searching for intimacy, purpose, and freedom amid shifting social expectations. Taylor's elegant prose and keen understanding of human relationships reveal how private lives are transformed by larger cultural change, while the changing seasons mirror the emotional lives of the novel's characters.

"A first novel of exciting quality . . . one of those uncommon books whose first page is a door through which the reader enters a little world of other people's lives and is lost for the time to his own."
— The Times Literary Supplement, 1930

"It is a great satisfaction—after reading the dozens of contrived and artificial novels that are dumped on the public every month—to come across at last a novel that reveals a soul."
— The Saturday Review of Literature, 1931