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

Louis de Bernières

25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION - WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR 
 
'A true diamond of a novel, glinting with comedy and tragedy' Daily Mail 
 
It is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. At first he is ostracised by the locals but over time he proves himself to be civilised, humorous &ndash; and a consummate musician. 
 
When Pelagia, the local doctor's daughter, finds her letters to her fiancé go unanswered, Antonio and Pelagia draw close and the working of the eternal triangle seems inevitable. But can this fragile love survive as a war of bestial savagery gets closer and the lines are drawn between invader and defender? 
 
'Louis de Bernières is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh...he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste' Evening Standard

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

Tessa Hadley

On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students’ party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of worldliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Sinden calls a few days later to invite them over to the grand suburban mansion Paul shares with his brother and sister, and Moira accepts despite Evelyn’s misgivings. 
 
As the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them, and release them into a new phase of their lives. 
 
In this delightful novella of two young women coming of age, Tessa Hadley explores the ever-changing desires, the sudden revelations and the lasting mysteries that are bound up with who we are, and who we might become.

The Party

Thomas McGuane

This is the story of the Whitelaws, a family whose values are as far flung as the territory they helped settle, and whose most recent generations have pioneered the landscape of dysfunction. The patriarch, Sunny Jim, exerts his perverse control even posthumously, by means of a last will and testament that binds the family fortune to a marriage that ought, by general consent, to be rent asunder. 
 
The charms of this particular son-in-law, lately released from prison, are potent if short-lived; Evelyn Whitelaw, his estranged wife, is quite literally bedevilled by them. And as her mother and sister court this twisted inheritance, her own yearnings point toward a way of life once habitual on the western plains but now embodied only by Bill Champion, the family's ranch foreman and Evelyn's one true compass. 
 
The Cadence of Grass is at once an elegy and a masterpiece of savage comedy from one of the most compelling novelists writing today.

The Cadence of Grass

Gwendoline Riley

Joshua and Natalie share a vexed five-year history of sporadic encounters, explosive drunkenness and failed intercourse, spliced with sad intimations of true love. Natalie is attempting to start a new life in Manchester, but when Joshua calls unexpectedly and asks her to meet him in America she knows she has no choice but to go. 
 
Whilst wandering around the Blue Ridge Mountains or lying together for days in their cheap hotel room, they talk about their lives - about his ex-wife, and her dead family - and come to a surprising understanding. 
 
Shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize.

Joshua Spassky

Julian Barnes

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 
 
Graham Hendrick, an historian, has left his wife Barbara for the vivacious Ann, and is more than pleased with his new life. Until, that is, the day he discovers Ann's celluloid past as a mediocre film actress. Soon Graham is pouncing on old clues, examining her books for inscriptions from past lovers, frequenting cinemas and poring over the bad movies she appeared in. It's not that he blames Anne for having a past before they met, but history has always mattered to him...

Before She Met Me

Anne Tyler

The glorious Sunday Times bestseller follows one family's joys and heartbreaks, mistakes and secrets, from the 1950s right up to today 
 
When Mercy Garrett moves herself out of the family home, everyone determines not to notice. 
 
All she wants is space and silence. No clutter. Not even their cat, Desmond. 
 
But it turns out family life is impossible to escape - particularly when it's in your past. For Mercy it all begins in 1959, with a holiday to a cabin by a lake. It's the only one the Garretts will ever take, but its effects will ripple through the generations 
 
 
'Gorgeous, charming, profound, and written with such lightness of touch' MARIAN KEYES 
 
'A perfect work of fiction' MEG MASON 
 
'She is and always will be my favourite author' LIANE MORIARTY 
 
'Exquisitely crafted, tender, hilarious, devastatingly precise, I loved this powerful meditation on the small and often unvoiced moments that can make up a life' RACHEL JOYCE 
 
'Anne Tyler really is the best... Her sheer brilliance makes it all seems so effortless' GRAHAM NORTON 
 
'A faultless novel, effortlessly profound. I read it in two sittings, totally immersed' VICTORIA HISLOP 
 
 
 
 
French Braid appeared in the Sunday Times bestseller list on on 03.04.2022, 10.04.2022 and 17.04.2022

French Braid

Margaret Forster

Born in Carlisle in 1887, brought up in a children's home and by reluctant relatives, Evie, with her wild hair and unassuming ways, seems a quiet, undemanding child. 
 
Shona, born almost seventy years later, is headstrong and striking. She grows up in comfort and security in Scotland, the only child of doting parents. But there are, as she discovers, unanswered questions about her past. 
 
The two girls have only one thing in common: both were abandoned as babies by their mothers. Different times, different circumstances, but these two girls grow up sharing the same obsession. Each sets out to stalk and then haunt her natural mother. Both mothers dread disclosure; both daughters seek emotional compensation and, ultimately, revenge.

Shadow Baby

Albert French

SOON TO BE FEATURED ON THE GRAHAM NORTON BOOK CLUB PODCAST ON AUDIBLE 
 
Discover Albert French's haunting first novel; a story of racial injustice, as unsentimental as it is heartbreaking. 
 
The tale of Billy Lee Turner, a ten-year-old boy convicted of the murder of a white girl in Mississippi in 1937, illuminates the monstrous face of racism in America with harrowing clarity and power. Narrated in the rich accents of the American South, Billy's story is told amid the picking fields and town streets, the heat, dust and poverty of the region in the time of the Depression. 
 
'Billy is a book that will stay with me in my dreams', Tim O'Brien author of The Things They Carried

Billy

Elizabeth Bowen

In 1914 they had been eleven years old; three little girls at St Agatha's, a day school on the South Coast. Fifty years later, Dinah, beautiful as ever, advertises in the national newspapers to find the other two – Clare, now established with a successful business, and Sheila, a married woman, glossy, chic and correct. Can friendship can be taken up where it was left off? What are the revelations - and the dangers - in summoning up childhood?

The Little Girls

Phoebe McIntosh

'A must-read... compulsively timely novel' Stylist 
 
When Layla and Andy first meet, they can't believe they have the same surname. It feels like fate… 
 
Sera, Layla’s best friend, has her doubts about Andy. As the couple fall deeper in love, Sera becomes more and more vocal about Layla settling down with a white boy. And then, only a few weeks before their wedding, Layla makes a devastating discovery – could their families be linked in the worst possible way? 
 
What seemed like a fairy-tale romance is rapidly derailed as Layla begins to uncover parts of her history and identity that she had never imagined – or, perhaps, had simply learnt to ignore. 
 
And now, she faces an impossible choice. 
 
**A STYLIST UNMISSABLE BOOK FOR 2024** 
 
‘A warm, sweet love story, and a thought-provoking examination of the British slave trade and its legacy’ MARIAN KEYES 
 
'I loved this book' JACQUELINE CROOKS, author of Fire Rush 
 
'So kind and smart and clear-eyed' HOLLY GRAMAZIO, author of The Husbands 
 
READERS LOVE DOMINOES: 
‘Tender, thought-provoking and hard-hitting’ 
‘Kept me second guessing how things would turn out until the very end’ 
‘Incredibly thought-provoking’ 
‘Such an important novel’ 
‘I laughed, I cried, I learned A LOT’ 
‘So much more than a love story’

Dominoes

Donald Pfarrer

The mission is Vietnam in microcosm: a quest to find and destroy a secret cache of enemy weapons. Leading this fateful journey is Captain MacHugh Clare, a draftee who has become the consummate soldier. Unconcerned with death, each morning he shifts immediately from unconsciousness to action. His reward at the end of the mission is the possibility of seeing his wife. 
 
Beside Mac is his opposite. Chaplain Paul Adrano, who knows only doubt and disillusion. He has come to Vietnam to kill his fear, to find his faith again on the field of battle, and he will soon know the forbidden power of violence and the pull of sexual temptation. 
 
Meanwhile, in America, Mac's Sarah wife fights her own battle - against a feeling of uselessness. Struggling with notions of a woman's proper role, Sarah begins to see possibilities beyond merely waiting for the man she loves. 
 
The Fearless Man is an epic novel of all the wars we wage to occupy ground, forge a future, and save our souls.

The Fearless Man

A Novel of Vietnam

Rose Tremain

'The best thing from Denmark since Hamlet.' John Julius Norwich 
 
In the year 1629, a young English lutenist named Peter Claire arrives at the Danish Court to join King Christian IV's Royal Orchestra. From the moment when he realises that the musicians perform in a freezing cellar underneath the royal apartments, Peter Claire understands that he's come to a place where the opposing states of light and dark, good and evil, are waging war to the death. 
 
Designated the King's 'Angel' because of his good looks, he finds himself falling in love with the young woman who is the companion of the King's adulterous and estranged wife, Kirsten. With his loyalties fatally divided between duty and passion, how can Peter Claire find the path that will realise his hopes and save his soul? 
 
'The best historical novelist of her generation. She evokes the past with sensuality, wit and superb sleights of hand... The plot is ingenious...an unforgettable tapestry of Eros and art.' A. N. Wilson

Music & Silence

James Scudamore

As a child Ludo is plucked out of the shantytown where he was born and transported to a world of languid, cosseted luxury. Now twenty-seven, he works high above the above the sprawling metropolis of São Paulo for a vacuous 'communications company'. But this is not his world, and this is not a simple rags-to-riches story: Ludo's destiny moves him around like a chess piece, showing him both extremities of opulent excess and abject poverty, taking him to the brink of madness and brutality. 
 
By the author of The Amnesia Clinic and winner of the Somerset Maugham Award.

Heliopolis

What do Mrs H., Rachel, Edwina, Ida, Sarah, Dot, Chrissie have in common? They're all women, but they're fat, thin, old, young, married or single - and appear as diverse as human nature can be. But they are all survivors. This enthralling novel follows the ripples that go out into ordinary lives that have been changed by a shared experience, all connected by the same hospital clinic in a small Northern town. 
 
This is a novel about what it means to live in the shadow of disease, and with scars, whether mental or physical. From the marvellous ambivalence of the title question, it leaves us with a whole lot more to consider about life and its infinite variety.

Is There Anything You Want?

Susan Hill

Colin. May. Frank. Berenice. The Prime children grew up in a bleak country farm house called The Beacon. Colin and Berenice married locally. May went to university in London, but came home within a year and never left again. Only Frank, quiet, watchful Frank, got away. He left for Fleet Street and a career in journalism but its the publication of a book about his childhood that brings the fame and money he craves - and tears his family apart.

The Beacon

Elizabeth McCracken

‘A big, glorious novel in every sense, this sprawling family saga…is a funny and big-hearted epic from a seriously gifted wordsmith’ 
Marie Claire 
 
Read the sweeping and enchanting new novel from the author of The Giant’s House 
 
Bertha is an enigma to everyone in Salford, Massachusetts – ever since she was discovered unconscious in a New England cemetery with nothing but a bowling ball, a candlepin and fifteen pounds of gold on her person. She has no past to speak of, and her mysterious origin scandalises the townspeople, as does her choice to marry and start a family with Leviticus Sprague, the doctor who revived her. 
 
But Bertha is plucky and entrepreneurial, and the bowling alley she opens quickly becomes Salford’s most defining landmark. As she changes the town forever, her singular spirit resonating through every board and brick and bone, an epic family saga unfolds, set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America.

Bowlaway

Tim Parks

The gift of tongues, prophecy exorcism. . . what might such concepts mean in a complacent backwater of North London? For Richard Bowen, adolescence becomes a nightmare when his parents join the charismatic movement and find a devil in his brother. 
 
Winner of the Somerset Maugham and Betty Trask Awards.

Tongues of Flame

Julie Myerson

'Bloody brilliant' Paula Hawkins, bestselling author of The Girl on the Train 
 
Some memories are too powerful to live only in the past. 
 
 During a ferocious storm, a red-haired stranger appears in the garden of a small farming cottage. Eliza and her parents take him in. But very soon, it’s clear he has no intention of leaving. 
 
 A century later, Mary and Graham have experienced every parent’s worst nightmare. Now, escaping the memories and the headlines, they have found an idyllic new home in rural Suffolk. A cottage, a beautiful garden. The perfect place to forget. To move on. But life doesn’t always work that way. 
A devastating depiction of profound loss, sexual longing, love and true evil, The Stopped Heart is the finest novel to date from this most fearless and original of writers.

The Stopped Heart

Helena Echlin

Dutiful and studious, Elizabeth has never been the rebel in her family. Now, in an attempt to bury her old self, she has moved to the deserts of the American Southwest to live in a house made out of beer cans with her boyfriend, Spencer, a crew-cut aficionado of country and western music. But memories of her unhappy adolescence prevent Elizabeth from embracing her new life and after proposing to Spencer to satisfy her dying grandmother's wish, Elizabeth is forced to return home to arrange an impromptu wedding. Once back in London, the discovery of disturbing secrets hampers her preparations and as the wedding date approaches, her family seems to be falling apart. Elizabeth must weigh the value of the American sincerity she has learned from Spencer against the repression that has been her family's lifelong habit. An intimate study of the unspoken passions of the English middle class, this exciting d-but novel is both poetic and gripping.

Gone

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

Marjorie Leet Ford

A romantic comedy with a delightfully biting literary edge, it's the story of Melissa, a sharp-eyed American abroad. Fired by her San Francisco ad agency, she cancels her wedding but soon regrets her next impulsive move - across the Atlantic, as au pair to a minorly aristocratic British family, with the mother from hell, an ineffectual, sweet-natured father, and three children, one of them deaf. 
 
From freezing farmhouses and island castles in Scotland, to a faded house at a smart London address, Melissa observes the natives in their classic habitats, with their bizarre manners and surprisingly gorgeous, death-defying food. Urged to 'try to speak as we do' she resists the effete charm of the British bourgeoisie but succumbs to the lure of lemon shortbread, and the sexy appeal of a lean and hungry Englishman.

The Diary of an American Au Pair

Isamay's unusual name comes from her two very different grandmothers, Isa and May, who were both present at her birth and who have both formed and influenced her whole life in very particular ways. Now almost thirty, Isamay is trying to write a thesis about grandmothers in history but is instead constantly ambushed by the startling secrets her own family has been keeping. When disturbing truths are revealed that force Isamay to examine her own certainties, will her grandmothers be able to build a bridge across the generations?

Isa and May

***The Sunday Times bestseller*** 
 
‘Just relishable. Thank God for the balm of good writing’ NIGELLA LAWSON 
‘A wise, wonderful book’ OBSERVER 
'Razor sharp on family, love and marriage' DAVID NICHOLLS 
'I devoured it in one long lazy afternoon - I laughed and cried' VICTORIA HISLOP 
 
Weddings aren't just about the happy couple… A funny, touching, hopeful story of love, marriage and second chances 
 
It’s the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines. 
 
First thing, she loses her job (or quits, depending who you ask). Then her ex-husband Max turns up at her door looking for somewhere to stay. He doesn’t even have a suit. Instead, he’s brought memories – and a cat looking for a new home. 
 
Just as Gail is wondering what’s next, their daughter Debbie discovers her groom has been keeping a secret which could throw the whole wedding into question… 
 
‘She is and always will be my favourite author’ LIANE MORIARTY 
 
'If Anne Tyler isn’t the best writer in the world, who is?' BBC R4 WOMAN'S HOUR 
 
‘She knows all the secrets of the human heart’ MONICA ALI 
 
‘My favourite writer’ NICK HORNBY 
 
'Anne Tyler really is the best' GRAHAM NORTON 
 
'Our greatest chronicler of family life' DAILY MAIL 
 
'Nobody does it better' VOGUE

Three Days in June

Lawrence Osborne

A tense, stunningly well-observed heist novel from 'the bastard child of Graham Greene and Patrica Highsmith' (Metro) 
 
Sarah Talbot Jennings, a young American living in New York, has fled to Bangkok to disappear. Armed with a suitcase full of cash, she takes up residence at the Kingdom, a glittering complex slowly sinking into its own twilight. There, against a backdrop of shadowy gossip and intrigue, she is soon drawn into the orbit of the Kingdom's glamorous ex-pat women. But when political chaos and a frenzied uprising wrack the streets below, and Sarah witnesses something unspeakable, her safe haven begins to feel like a trap. 
 
 From a master of atmosphere and suspense comes a brilliantly unsettling story of cruelty and psychological unrest, and an enthralling glimpse into the shadowy crossroads of karma and human greed.

The Glass Kingdom

Dani Shapiro

Are the parents always to blame? 
 
Rachel Jensen has it all: a husband she adores, fulfilling work in art restoration, a terrific teenage daughter and finally a new baby on the way. So when she worries about mysterious changes in her daughter Kate's behaviour, friends reassure her it's just normal teen angst. 
 
But then a terrifying accident involving Kate and her infant brother sets off a series of events that threaten to destroy everything Rachel has worked so hard to build. 
 
From the beloved author of SIGNAL FIRES and BLACK & WHITE, FAMILY HISTORY is a visceral, ferociously paced novel about one mothers nightmarish realisation that she cannot protect her own child. 
 
‘Riveting’ Harper's Bazaar 
‘Graceful’ Glamour 
‘A poised, absorbing book’ New York Times Book Review

Family History

An improbable coincidence brings Clare back into contact with someone she once had sex with at a teenage party; complicatedly, he is now going out with her best friend, Helly. The encounter needn't have meant anything - it could just have been funny, or embarrassing - but it seems to have the power to shake up everything in Clare's life. Clare is married with three small children, she bakes her own bread and buys her clothes from the charity shop. Helly is an actress and has her golden curves pasted up on billboards ten foot high. And each of them seems to want what the other has. Clare's story is intertwined with other stories of her extended family. Her father has been married three times and left a trail of children. Accidents in the Home dips in and out of the lives of this complicated, close, fraught family, reaching out into the past for explanation and illumination as well as across the present. It is the debut of a quite formidable fictional talent.

Accidents in the Home

Cees Nooteboom

Alma and Almut share a fascination for Australia and its ancient peoples; their ceremonies, sand drawings and body paintings. After Alma suffers a traumatic attack, they board a cheap flight from São Paulo to Sydney, and together begin their journey across their secret continent. Alma slowly recovers through a brief love affair with an Aboriginal artist, and both women become involved with the Angel Project in Perth, where actors dressed as angels are concealed around the city for the public to discover. 
 
In a seemingly unconnected story, a man staying at a remote Alpine spa unexpectedly meets a woman he encountered years before and with whom he shared a single night. It was in a faraway city and she was dressed as an angel...

Lost Paradise

Frances Leviston

'Superbly written and fearlessly imagined fiction' Sarah Hall 
 
Ten women, all called Claire, are tangled up in complex power dynamics with their families, friends, and lovers. Though all are different ages, and leading different lives, each is haunted by the difficulty of living on her own terms. 
 
Claire is a teenaged babysitter left alone with a strange little girl and her imaginary friend. Claire is a woman trying to escape her elderly mother by employing an android carer. Claire is a young TV journalist wrecking her first big interview. Claire's boyfriend discovers more than he bargains for when he begins to read her diary. 
 
And whatever she does, Claire is always living in the shadow of a monstrous mother. 
 
'Leviston is a mistress of precision and emotional insight' Hilary Mantel, TLS

The Voice in My Ear

A. S. Byatt

Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. 
 
They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them. This is the children's book.

The Children's Book

Elaine Feeney

THE INSTANT IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 
WINNER OF AUTHOR OF THE YEAR AT THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS 
 
Claire O’Connor’s life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved back home to the rugged West of Ireland to care for her dying father. She spends her days getting lost online, going to work and minding her own business. 
 
But Claire is thrown back into a love she thought she’d left behind when Tom unexpectedly moves nearby, stirring up haunting memories trapped within the walls of the old family house. As the secrets of the past are revealed, Claire must confront whether she can escape her history to make a future for herself.

Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way

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

Showing results for: ‘Evelyn Waugh’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter