Books Do Furnish a Room is a novel by Anthony Powell, the tenth in the twelve-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time.

The book conveys the atmosphere of post-war austerity as the characters that have survived attempt to resume their former life after the interruption of the conflict.

Nicholas Birns has observed, “the novel’s title connotes a provisional postwar recovery.”[1] It deals in particular with the chaotic career of X. Trapnel as a writer and the brief life of the new magazine Fission.

As always, the story is narrated by Nick Jenkins, who is currently researching a book on Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, quotations from which are frequently applied by way of commentary to the different situations he encounters in the novel.

“Given the emphasis on literature in Books Do Furnish A Room, we see more of Nicholas Jenkins as a writer than ever before.”[2] During its course Nick and his Tolland relations attend the funeral after Erridge's early death; it is also attended by Widmerpool and his wife Pamela, who typically manages to disrupt the ceremony and the family gathering at Erridge’s living quarters at Thrubworth afterwards.