Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

P.G. Wodehouse

P G Wodehouse is widely recognized as the greatest English comic writer of the twentieth century. 
 
His characters and settings have entered our language and our mythology. The first ever collected edition (Wodehouse had many publishers in his lifetime), the Everyman Wodehouse, will contain all the novels and stories, newly edited and reset from the first British edition. 
 
Printed on cream-wove, acid-free paper, sewn and bound in cloth, each Everyman volume is already recognized as the finest edition of the master ever published.

"Deep down in his heart the genuine Englishman has a rugged distaste for seeing his country invaded by a foreign army. People were asking themselves by what right these aliens had overrun British soil. An ever-growing feeling of annoyance had begun to lay hold of the nation.” 
 
Clarence Chugwater is not a Boy Scout for nothing. It is summer 1909 and everyone is too interested in the Test Match to notice that England has been invaded by the Germans. And the Russians. And the Chinese. Not to mention a ‘boisterous band of the Young Turks’, a mad Mullah, and a brace of North African pirates. The government has recently abolished the army so there is nothing to be done about it anyway, except give a masterly display of polite indifference. But this would be to reckon without patriotic Clarence, ‘Boy of Destiny’, who alone is prepared to stand up to the foe, and who devises a highly unorthodox plan to restore his country to freedom… 
 
The Swoop! Or, How Clarence Saved England reprints the 33 black and white drawings by C. Harrison that accompanied the first edition. It is supplemented by The Military Invasion of America, in which Clarence’s story is humorously transplanted across the Atlantic.

The Swoop! & The Military Invasion of America

A classic musical comedy plot turned into a novel, The Prince and Betty is the story of a man who gives up everything for his girl. Fortunately, she chances to be the step-daughter of a millionaire. John Maude and Betty Silver are in love, but when John turns out to be heir to the principality of Mervo, a small Mediterranean island not a thousand miles from Monte Carlo, he finds himself ensnared in the establishment of a new casino on the island, much to his beloved’s high-minded disgust. She leaves him and takes a job with an American family in London; he abandons his post to follow her. Eventually their misunderstandings are disentangled: the pair are reunited, betrothed and bound for a new life in the United States. And so it is that, in the process of telling their story, published early in his career, Wodehouse constructs the critique of Europe versus America, privilege versus enterprise, decadence versus adventure, which was to underpin many of his later tales.

The Prince and Betty

In Wodehouse’s final novel, unfinished at his death, the author returns to his favourite part of England for one last time. In a classic plot, Vicky Underwood is parted from her fiancé, Jeff Bennison, which means that her uncle, Galahad Threepwood, has to engineer a complicated plot to bring them back together. Many old friends reappear to take their last bow: the Earl of Emsworth, Dame Daphne Winkworth, Beach the butler, the Empress of Blandings (Lord Emsworth’s prize pig), Freddie Threepwood (his son), G. Ovens, innkeeper, and an array of the earl’s formidable sisters.     There may be trouble in the air, but at Blandings Castle it is always summer, always quiet and sunlit - and the powers of darkness are always ultimately defeated. Just how that defeat would have been brought about, had Wodehouse completed his story, is shown in the copious notes he made for it. These are included in this volume, together with commentary by Richard Usborne, Tony Ring and Norman Murphy.

Sunset At Blandings

Further stories of members of the Drones Club and several adventures related by the Oldest Member of the golf club. Many old friends reappear - Bingo Little and Mrs Bingo, Freddie Widgeon, Ambrose Gussett, Agnes Flack, Horace Bewstridge and many more. Including: The Shadow Passes. Bramley is so Bracing. Up From the Depths. Feet of Clay. Excelsior. Rodney Has a Relapse. Tangled Hearts. Birth of a Salesman. How's That, Umpire? Success Story.

Nothing Serious

Typical. Just when Bertie thinks that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world, things start to go wrong again... 
There's young Bingo Little, who's in love for the umpteenth time and needs Bertie to put in a good word for him with his uncle; Aunt Agatha, who forces Bertie to get engaged to the formidable Honoria Glossop; and the troublesome twins, Claude and Eustace, whose antics when let loose in London know no bounds. 
Add to that some friction in the Wooster home over a red cummerbund, purple socks and some snazzy old Etonian spats, and poor Bertie's really in the soup... 
Only one man can save the day - the inimitable Jeeves. 
 
Characters Bertie Wooster - Narrator who went to school with Bingo. Won a prize at his first school for the best collection of wild flowers. 
Jeeves - Bertie's valet who has an aunt who loves the romantic novels of Rosie M. Banks 
Bingo Little - Mortimer's nephew who loves Mabel. Tells his uncle that Bertie is really Rosie M. Banks. 
Mabel - Waitress in a tea shop 
Mortimer Little - Retired fat businessman who owned Little's Liniment - "It Limbers Up the Legs." He is a gourmet. 
Jane Watson - Mortimer's cook engaged to Jeeves, but not for long

The Inimitable Jeeves

The titles of the first story in this collection – 'Jeeves Takes Charge' – and the last – 'Bertie Changes His Mind' – sum up the relationship of twentieth-century fiction's most famous comic characters.  In between them, the various feeble-minded men and lively young women who populate Wooster's world appeal to Jeeves to solve their problems and are never disappointed.

Carry On, Jeeves

Containing drafts of stories later rewritten for other collections (including Carry On, Jeeves), My Man Jeeves offers a fascinating insight into the genesis of comic literature's most celebrated double-act. All the stories are set in New York, four of them featuring Jeeves and Wooster themselves; the rest concerning Reggie Pepper, an earlier version of Bertie. Plots involve the usual cast of amiable young clots, choleric millionaires, chorus-girls and vulpine aunts, but towering over them all is the inscrutable figure of Jeeves, manipulating the action from behind the scenes. 
Early or not, these stories are masterly examples of Wodehouse's art,turning the most ordinary incidents into golden farce.

My Man Jeeves

Would-be painter, George Finch, with lots of money and no talent, falls for lovely Molly Waddington who falls for him. Unfortunately, Molly’s snobbish stepmother, Mrs Sigsbee H. Waddington, New York society queen, has grander ideas for Molly, not least because George comes from Idaho, which is in every sense beyond the pale. Based on a 1917 musical comedy script by Wodehouse and his friend, Guy Bolton, The Small Bachelor tells the story of George’s struggle to win his girl, with the willing help of Hamilton Beamish, author of self-improvement pamphlets, and the unwitting assistance of a poetic policeman, Molly’s henpecked father, and New York’s premier female pickpocket.

The Small Bachelor

The action is mostly set at Rudge Hall, home to the obese miser Lester Carmody, and at Healthward Ho, a health farm run by 'Chimp Twist, along with his cohorts 'Soapy' and 'Dolly' Molloy. who were all previously encountered in Sam The Sudden (1925) and would return in Money in the Bank (1946). 
Hugo Camody, Lester's nephew, and his friend Ronnie Fish, would appear later in Blandings Castle, home of Ronnie's uncle Lord Emsworth, in Summer Lightening (1929) and Heavy Weather (1933)

Money For Nothing

This volume reprints two of Wodehouse’s earliest books which take the form of story sequences linked by a central character, a technique he used many times thereafter. Delightful in themselves, they are interesting chiefly as windows on a great writer’s early evolution. 
 
In The Man of Means, he looks forward to Bertie Wooster and Ukridge, but also back to his Victorian models, in a fantastic tale of the little man struggling with fate. When a humble clerk comes into a fortune, he embarks on a series of misadventures which suggest that wealth is not necessarily an unmixed blessing. Here we see signs of the satirical writer Wodehouse might have become, and the spirit of Chaplin is not far away.

Kid Brady Stories & A Man of Means

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

The Fall of the West

Hunt the Villain

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Fight or Flight (Book 21)

The Mortons

Watch a trailer for The Spook's Blood

A photograph of Ben Barnes in character for Shadow and Bone Netflix series.

Interviews

Shadow and Bone’s Ben Barnes on tear-jerking books and what he’s reading

An image showing a selection of adventure stories for 9-12 year olds on a bright yellow background with orange doodles that include a hashtag, flag, danger sign and speech bubble

Children's reading lists

16 books for 9 to 12-year-olds that love adventures

An image of a selection of books for 9-12s on a blue background with a large splodge and striped print

24 must-read books for 9-12-year-olds

A picture of several different children's books on a pink to blue ombre background; each book has a bright yellow shadow

Showing results for: ‘joseph delaney’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter