Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Margery Allingham

A VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERY 
Agatha Christie called her ‘a shining light’. Have you discovered Margery Allingham, the 'true queen' of the classic murder mystery? 
 
A baker’s dozen of cases, each putting Albert Campion through his paces. In this miscellany of villainy, our unconventional sleuth must contend with misbehaving debutantes, sinister smuggling rings, a Dowager Countess who’s not all that she seems, an SOS message daubed in lipstick, a beleaguered New York socialite, and an elderly Egyptologist indulging in some bad behaviour…

Mr Campion & Others

Mary Wesley

Before her death in 2002, Mary Wesley told her biographer Patrick Marnham: 'after I met Eric I never looked at anyone else again. We lived our ups and downs but life was never boring'. Eric Siepmann was her second husband and their correspondence charted their life together (and apart) with unusual candour and spirit. 
 
These remarkable letters, which were inspired by Mary's great love story with Eric, were also the means by which the novelist found her voice. Entrusted to Marnham in two size -5 shoe boxes, this is one of the great surviving post-war correspondences.

Darling Pol

Letters of Mary Wesley and Eric Siepmann 1944-1967

A.L. Kennedy

A.L. Kennedy's fifth collection of short stories show us exactly what becomes of the broken-hearted. Her characters are perfectly ordinary people - whose marriages founder; who sit on their own in a cinema watching a film with no soundtrack; who risk sex in a hotel with an anonymous stranger or who order a luxurious meal as their lives fall apart - but the stories she weaves around them are truly remarkable. 
 
She reveals the sadness, violence, hurt and terror, but also the redemption and the love - and she does so with enormous human compassion and leaps of black humour. 
 
From the winner of the Costa Book Award for Day.

What Becomes

Christopher Isherwood

Don Bachardy

Christopher Isherwood was a celebrated English writer when he met the Californian teenager Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1952. They spent their first night together on Valentine’s Day 1953. Defying the conventions, the two men began living as an openly gay couple in an otherwise closeted Hollywood. The Animals provides a loving testimony of an extraordinary relationship that lasted until Chris’s death in 1986 – and survived affairs (on both sides) and a thirty-year-age-gap. 
 
In romantic letters to one another, the couple created the private world of the Animals. Chris was Dobbin, a stubborn old workhorse; Don was the playful young white cat, Kitty. But Don needed to carve out his own identity – some of their longest sequences of letters were exchanged during his trips to London and New York, to pursue his career as an artist and to widen his emotional and sexual horizons. 
 
Amidst the intimate domestic dramas, we learn of Isherwood’s continuing literary success –the royalty cheques from Cabaret, the acclaim for his pioneering novel A Single Man – and the bohemian whirl of Californian film suppers and beach life. Don, whose portraits of London theatreland were making his name, attends the world premiere of The Innocents with Truman Capote and afterwards dines with Deborah Kerr and the rest of the cast, spends weekends with Tennessee Williams, Cecil Beton, or the Earl and Countess of Harewood, and tours Egypt and Greece with a new love interest. But whatever happens in the outside world, Dobbin and Kitty always return to their ‘Basket’ and to each other. Candid, gossipy, exceptionally affectionate, The Animals is a unique interplay between two creative spirits, confident in their mutual devotion.

The Animals

Love Letters between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy

Elizabeth Bowen

This selection of Bowen's non-fictional writings includes her wonderfully funny, precise recollections of schooldays and childhood experiences, her brilliant evocations of London in wartime and of the Irish 'big house', and penetrating accounts of some of her most famous contemporaries. It also contains her autobiography, posthumously published and left tantalising unfinished, a little known portrait of a beloved family servant, and unpublished letters to close friends as Virginia Woolf and William Plomer, written with as much elegance and energy as her 'public' writing. In her introduction, Hermoine Lee shows how these writings display the same interests as Elizabeth Bowen's fiction - in Anglo-Irish dispossession and ambivalence, in the persistence of chilhood feelings, in treachery, ghosts, and the mysterious power of place, the lure of nostalgia , and the clash between individual and society.

The Mulberry Tree

What will you get for your birthday this year? A chance to see into the future? Or a reminder of the imperfect past? 
 
In this enviable gathering, Haruki Murakami has chosen for his party some of the very best short story writers of recent years, each with their own birthday experiences, each story a snapshot of life on a single day. Including stories by Russell Banks, Ethan Canin, Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Claire Keegan, Andrea Lee, Daniel Lyons, Lewis Robinson, Lynda Sexson, Paul Theroux, William Trevor and Haruki Murakami, this anthology captures a range of emotions evoked by advancing age and the passing of time, from events fondly recalled to the impact of appalling tragedy. 
 
Previously published in a Japanese translation by Haruki Murakami, this English edition contains a specially written introduction.

Birthday Stories

Selected and Introduced by Haruki Murakami

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

Fifty Shades of Grey

Wuthering Heights

White Nights

Extracts

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

Features

Beyond Brideshead: why Evelyn Waugh needs to be reclaimed as our funniest writer

A flatlay of some of Nancy Mitford's most notable works. 

Reading lists

Where to start with Nancy Mitford

Beautiful classics for the shelf-conscious bookworm

11 beautiful classics for the shelf-conscious bookworm

Interviews

Meet the author: Martin Latham, the country's leading bookseller

The glittering highs and dark lows of 8 books set in the 1920s

The glittering highs and dark lows of 7 books set in the 1920s

Eight favourite aristocratic classics

Funny books guaranteed to make you laugh out loud

Reading rituals: what's your strangest book habit?

Despite the war, the 1940s was a bumper decade for publishing

Books that shaped the 1940s

Debut novels of 2025: discover the year’s breakthrough new voices

The rising stars of 2026: discover the must-read debut novels of the year

An illustration of a book against a background

20 novels that shaped the Victorian era

A collage of book covers on a light blue background. Titles include I Capture the Castle, Beloved, The Secret History and The Wind in the Willows.

100 must-read classics, as chosen by our readers

The best literary podcasts for book lovers

39 of the best literary and book podcasts for book lovers

20 books that defined the 1930s

From Jane Austen's Chawton to Bram Stoker's Whitby, this is the definitive literary tour of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

A literary tour of the United Kingdom

Photo of authors James Holland and Al Murray in the Penguin Podcast studio

The Penguin Podcast: episode 10 - history special

stemming

Showing results for: ‘Evelyn Waugh’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter