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

Jo Nesbo

'Many authors know how to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Jo Nesbo's one of the few who keeps them there' Linwood Barclay 
 
'A series of spectacular plot twists leads to a thrilling finale. Highly recommended' Guardian 
 
THE MARK OF THE DEVIL. 
 
A young woman is murdered in her flat and a tiny red diamond in the shape of a five-pointed star is found behind her eyelid. 
 
THE SIGN OF A KILLER. 
 
Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case, alongside his long-time adversary Tom Waaler, and initially wants no part in it. But Harry is already on his final warning and has little alternative but to drag himself out of his alcoholic stupor when it becomes apparent that Oslo has a serial killer on its hands. 
 
IS THIS AN EVIL THAT ONLY HARRY HOLE CAN STOP?

Detective Hole: The Devil’s Star

Asta Olivia Nordenhof

In the aftermath of a national disaster, a couple look back on their marriage and what it cost them in this groundbreaking novel about capitalism’s effect on the human heart 
 
*Guardian best translated fiction of 2025* 
 
'Buzzes with electricity… intriguing, maddening, exciting. I’m in’ Observer 
 
'Like a normal novel with the boring bits taken out' Guardian 
 
Maggie and Kurt are struggling to hold their marriage together after their only daughter has left home. They live in an old farmhouse in Nyborg but somehow keep missing each other, unable to discuss the events that brought them together. 
 
Decades ago, a passenger ferry called the Scandinavian Star caught fire, killing 159 people. The event is still considered a national tragedy in Denmark and Norway. Years later, it was revealed not to be an accident, but the result of an insurance scam gone wrong. 
 
How is the Scandinavian Star disaster connected to Maggie and Kurt? How does money affect and infect our closest relationships? And is it ever possible to escape? 
 
'Taut and intelligent… a moving love story and an incendiary indictment of contemporary society' Literary Review 
 
‘A comet in Scandinavian literature’ OLGA RAVN 
 
‘Startling and irresistible’ CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT 
 
'Unusual, fascinating, and complicated in the best way' CLAIRE FULLER 
 
'Nordenhof's writing is electrifying' CHETNA MAROO

Money to Burn

Pauline Delabroy-Allard

An intoxicating and evocative novel about the all-consuming love affair between two women in Paris and the ruin it leaves in its wake. 
 
'Captivating...intense...seductive' Guardian 
 
A thirty-something teacher drifts through her life in Paris, raising a daughter on her own, lonely in spite of a new boyfriend. Then one night, at a friend's tepid New Year's Eve party, Sarah enters the scene like a tornado. A talented young violinist, she is loud, vivacious, appealingly unkempt in a world where everyone seems preoccupied with being 'just so'. It is the beginning of an intense relationship, tender and violent, that will upend both women's lives. 
 
A literary sensation in France, All About Sarah perfectly captures the pull of a desire so strong that it blinds us to everything else. 
 
'All About Sarah moves impressively from the chaos and noise of love, to silence and solitude, like a spun coin settling' Observer

All About Sarah

Haruki Murakami

A mesmerising mystery story about friendship from the internationally bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and 1Q84 
 
Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning ‘red pine’, and Oumi, ‘blue sea’, while the girls’ names were Shirane, ‘white root’, and Kurono, ‘black field’. Tazaki was the only last name with no colour in it. 
 
One day Tsukuru Tazaki’s friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him, ever again. 
 
Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through life, unable to form intimate connections with anyone. But then he meets Sara, who tells him that the time has come to find out what happened all those years ago.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Irène Némirovsky

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française. 
 
Pierre and Agnès marry for love against the wishes of his parents and the family patriarch, the tyrannical industrialist Julien Hardelot, provoking a family feud which cascades down the generations. Even when war is imminent and Pierre is called up, the old man is unforgiving. Taut, evocative and beautifully paced, All Our Worldly Goods points up with heartbreaking detail and clarity how close were those two wars, how history repeated itself, tragically, shockingly... 
 
'A remarkable novel...beautifully translated... Her voice, compassionate yet always shrewd, with its sharp portrait of France at war and during the optimistic and confused Twenties and early Thirties, is always distinctive' Literary Review

All Our Worldly Goods

**HARRY HOLE IS SOON TO BE A MAJOR NETFLIX TV SERIES** 
 
'The king of all crime writers' Sunday Express 
 
There's a new killer on the streets 
 
A woman is found murdered after an internet date. The marks left on her body show the police that they are dealing with a particularly vicious killer. 
 
And he's out for blood 
 
Under pressure from the media to solve the crime, the force know there's only one man for the job. But Harry Hole is reluctant to return to the place that almost took everything from him. Until he starts to suspect a connection between this killing and his one failed case... 
 
*JO NESBO HAS SOLD OVER 60 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE* 
 
*Watch out for KILLING MOON, the new Jo Nesbo book, out now* 
 
Jo Nesbo was a Sunday Times number one bestseller with Macbeth on 20/09/2018

The Thirst

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française. 
 
Hélène is a troubled young girl. Neglected by her self-absorbed mother and her adored but distant father, she longs for love and for freedom. As first the Great War and then the Russian Revolution rage in the background, she grows from a lonely, melancholy child to an angry young woman intent on destruction. 
 
The Wine of Solitude is a powerful tale of an unhappy family in difficult times and a woman prepared to wreak a shattering revenge.

The Wine of Solitude

Guy Goffette

On a cold winter morning in Paris in 1893, Marie, a farmer's daughter from the Midi is helped across a bustling street by a diffident young artist named Pierre Bonnard. When the two finally speak she introduces herself not as Marie, but as Marthe de Méligny, the aristocratic daughter of Italian parents. 
 
Marthe becomes Bonnard's lover and muse for the next fifty years; before he met her there were no nudes in his work but afterwards her body, perched naked above a mirror of water or at her toilette, would dominate his art. Forever Nude is an homage, a love letter, an impassioned, intimate record of the artist - a great friend of Matisse, a great enemy of Picasso - and an extraordinary evocation of the world of both artist and model.

Forever Nude

A Fiction

Linea Maja Ernst

Five friends from university; seven summer days in a lakeside cabin in Denmark. A chance to swim, sunbathe, flirt, read and recreate the magic of their youth. 
 
At least that’s what Sylvia had hoped. But then her friends arrive with real jobs, kids and partners. Worse, Esben (her decades-long crush) and Karen announce their plan to get married at the end of the week. As desire and anxiety swirl, and the wedding day approaches, will the group achieve their arcadian dreams or will everything come tumbling down?

Waist Deep

Arnost Lustig

Fifteen-year-old Hanka Kaudersová has ginger hair and clear, green eyes. When her family is deported to Auschwitz, her mother, father and younger brother are sent to the gas chamber. By a twist of fate, Hanka is faced with a simple alternative: follow her family, or work in an SS brothel behind the eastern front. She chooses to live, her Aryan looks allowing her to disguise the fact that she is Jewish. As the German army retreats from the Russian front, Hanka battles cold, hunger, fear and shame, sustained by her hatred for the men she entertains, her friendship with the mysterious Estelle, and her fierce, burning desire for life. 
 
Lovely Green Eyes explores the compromises and sacrifices that an individual may make in order to survive, the way a woman can retain her identity in the face of appalling trauma, and the value of human life itself. This is a remarkable novel, which soars beyond nightmare, leaving the reader with a transcendent sense of hope.

Lovely Green Eyes

Ma Jian

Meili, a young peasant woman born in the remote heart of China, is married to Kongzi, a village school teacher, and a distant descendant of Confucius. They have a daughter, but desperate for a son to carry on his illustrious family line, Kongzi gets Meili pregnant again without waiting for official permission. When family planning officers storm the village to arrest violators of the population control policy, mother, father and daughter escape to the Yangtze River and begin a fugitive life. 
 
For years they drift south through the poisoned waterways and ruined landscapes of China, picking up work as they go along, scavenging for necessities and flying from police detection. As Meili’s body continues to be invaded by her husband and assaulted by the state, she fights to regain control of her fate and that of her unborn child.

The Dark Road

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française. 
 
Ada grows up motherless in the Jewish pogroms of a Ukrainian city in the early years of the twentieth century. In the same city, Harry Sinner, the cosseted son of a city financier, belongs to a very different world. Eventually, in search of a brighter future, Ada moves to Paris and makes a living painting scenes from the world she has left behind. Harry Sinner also comes to Paris to mingle in exclusive circles, until one day he buys two paintings which remind him of his past and the course of Ada's life changes once more...

The Dogs and the Wolves

Faiza Guéne

Dreams from the Endz is the story of twenty-four-year-old Ahlème, who is spirited, sassy and wise but has more problems than she knows how to deal with. Her father, The Boss, is permanently disabled after an accident on a building site, her sixteen-year-old brother, Foued, has been permanently excluded from school and seems intent on joining the drug-dealers who share their estate, while she is left to deal with the guilt trips from their family back in Algeria. But when she returns home - after a ten-year absence - she brokers a kind of truce, both with her homeland and the need to forge a future.

Dreams from the Endz

FAMILY COMES FIRST. NO MATTER THE COST. 
 
'A 100% buy-today-read-tonight delight' LEE CHILD 
 
'Bracingly and bleakly funny' Telegraph 
 
Brothers Carl and Roy Opgard have succeeded in life. Or at least they’ve had as much success as is possible in a small town like Os, where they've killed their way to the top. Carl manages the swanky spa hotel, while Roy has made ambitious plans for an amusement park. 
 
Life’s good at the top. But the local sheriff is looking to bring them down. 
 
Sheriff Kurt Olsen believes he has new evidence that will prove the brothers’ involvement in several past murders – but Carl and Roy are used to covering their tracks, and they're not afraid to get their hands dirty. 
 
The body count in Os is about to get even higher. 
 
Blood Ties is an explosive suspense novel about family, loyalty, and the lengths someone is willing to go to for both, from crime writing's king of the cliffhanger.

Blood Ties

Peter Høeg

You'll tell her your darkest secrets 
 
Susan Svendsen has an unusual talent. She is an expert in finding out secrets. People feel compelled to confide in her and unwittingly confess their innermost thoughts. Her whole life, she has exploited this talent, but now her family is in jeopardy and there is a prison sentence hanging over her head. 
 
Then Susan gets a timely offer from a former government official: use her power one more time and have all charges dropped. But there are some powerful people determined to stop her.

The Susan Effect

Gerbrand Bakker

When his twin brother dies in a car accident, Helmer is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother's role and spending the rest of his days 'with his head under a cow'. 
 
After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. 'A double bed and a duvet', advises Ada, who lives next door, with a sly look. Then Riet appears, the woman once engaged to marry his twin. Could Riet and her son live with him for a while, on the farm? 
 
The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies. 
 
Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, as seen through the eyes of a farmer, The Twin is, in the end, about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one's own hands. It chronicles a way of life which has resisted modernity, is culturally apart, and yet riven with a kind of romantic longing.

The Twin

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Nine lives will be changed forever in the exhilarating new novel from the international bestseller. 
 
'Addictive' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Knausgaard retains the ability to lock you, as if in a tractor beam, into his storytelling' New York Times 
 
One long night in August, Arne and Tove are staying with their children in their summer house in southern Norway. Kathrine, a priest, is flying home from a Bible seminar, questioning her marriage. Journalist Jostein is out drinking for the night, while his wife, Turid, a nurse at a psychiatric care unit, is on a nightshift when one of her patients escapes. 
 
Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears blazing in the sky, and so begins a series of mysterious events. For these six, and three others, life is about to become ever more surprising and unruly... 
 
'I read The Morning Star compulsively, and stayed awake all night after finishing it' Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life 
 
'Brilliant storytelling... Epic' Independent 
 
'Captivating' Observer

The Morning Star

The compulsive new novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author

Peter Høeg's first novel is an interweaving of the lives and loves of four families, within which histories time expands, clocks stop or race forward at will. The dreams and disappointments of the children of the author's magnificent imagination foreshadow the themes of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow and Borderliners

The History Of Danish Dreams

Enrique Vila-Matas

Marcelo, a clerk in a Barcelona office who might himself have emerged from a novel by Kafka, inhabits a world peopled by characters in literature. He once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then he has written nothing. He has, in short, become a 'Bartleby', so named after the character in Herman Melville's short story who, when asked to do something, always replied: 'I would prefer not to.' 
 
One day Marcelo sets out to make a search through literature for all those other possible Bartlebys, and with this in mind he has the engagingly original notion of keeping a diary and writing footnotes to an invisible text. His references to authors, both real and invented, provide the reader with extravagant doses of humour that are at once hilarious, irreverent and stimulating.

Bartleby And Co

Amin Maalouf

A graceful story of love across an insuperable gulf and a powerful allegory for the conflict that has beset the Middle East for the last half century. 
 
To call your son Ossyane is like calling him Rebellion. For Ossyane’s father it is a gesture of protest by an excited Ottoman prince, for Ossyane himself it is a burdensome responsibility. At eighteen he leaves Beirut to study in Montpellier, far away from his father’s revolutionary aspirations for him. But it is 1938, and when war breaks out in Europe, Ossyane is drawn into the Resistance. His return to Beirut is a rebel hero’s welcome after all, and a joyful reunion with Clara, whom he first met in France. But if one war has brought the Jewish-Muslim couple together, another, much closer to home, is destined to separate Ossyane from the people and the world that he loves.

Ports of Call

Umberto Eco

An extraordinary epic, brilliantly-imagined, new novel from a world-class writer and author of The Name of the Rose. Discover the Middle Ages with Baudolino - a wondrous, dazzling, beguiling tale of history, myth and invention. 
 
It is 1204, and Constantinople is being sacked and burned by the knights of the fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion Baudolino saves a Byzantine historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors, and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story.

Baudolino

Yan Lianke

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2017 
 
With the Yi River on one side and the Balou Mountains on the other, the village of Explosion was founded a thousand years ago by refugees fleeing a volcanic eruption. But in the post-Mao era, the name takes on a new significance as the rural community grows explosively from a small village to a town to a city to a vast megalopolis. 
 
Behind this rapid expansion are three rival clans linked together by a web of ambition, madness and greed. Together they transform their hometown into a Babylon of modern times -- an unrivalled urban superpower built on lies, sex and thievery. 
 
'One of the masters of modern Chinese literature' Jung Chang

The Explosion Chronicles

Per Petterson

Petterson’s debut novel, published in English for the first time 
 
Twelve-year-old Arvid and his family are on holiday, staying with his grandparents on the coast of Denmark. Dimly aware of the tension building between his mother and grandmother, Arvid is on the cusp of becoming a teenager: feeling awkward in his own skin, but adamant that he can take care of himself. 
 
As Arvid cycles down to the beach with its view of the lighthouse, he meets Mogens, an older boy who lives nearby, and together they set out to find fresh experiences in this strange new world. Echoland is a breathtaking read, capturing the unique drift of childhood summers, filled with unarticulated anxiety.

Echoland

Jonas Hassen Khemiri

'A bold and remarkable novel...full of heart and compassion' Dinaw Mengestu 
 
A bad-tempered grandfather, now living abroad, is back in Stockholm to see his adult children. The son is a failure, the daughter is having a baby with the wrong man, and their mother is a heartless deserter. Only he, the patriarch, is perfect - according to himself, at least. Over ten intense days, the strained relationships of this chaotic but entirely normal family unfold, and painful memories begin to resurface. Something has to give. But the son is duty-bound to his father by a murky, years-old agreement - can it be renegotiated, or will it bind everyone to the past for ever? 
 
'The dynamics of each relationship are superbly complex, and Khemiri's wry, comic touch gives a lightness to the inevitability as the children follow in their father's footsteps' Guardian 
 
'Excellent...the complex portrait of a family that is both identifiable and distinctive, normal and strange' TLS

The Family Clause

From the author of the bestselling Suite Française. 
 
Le Bal is a sharp, brittle story of a girl who sets out to ruin the mother she hates. The Kampfs have risen swiftly up the ranks of 1930s Parisian society. Painfully aware of her working-class roots, and desperate to win acceptance, Madame Kampf decides to throw a huge ball to announce her arrival to society. Her daughter Antoinette, who has just turned fourteen, dreams of attending, but Madame Kampf is resolved not to present her daughter to potential admirers. In a fury of adolescent rage and despair, Antoinette exacts a swift and horrible revenge... 
 
Snow in Autumn pays homage to Némirovsky's beloved Chekhov and chronicles the life of a devoted servant following her masters as they flee Revolutionary Moscow and emigrate to a life of hardship in Paris. As the crisis pushes the family to the brink of dissolution, Tatiana struggles to adapt to life in Paris and waits in vain for her cherished first snow of autumn.

Le Bal

Manuel De Lope

On the cusp of the Spanish Civil War in a coastal village in the Basque country, three men stop off at Extarri's bar on their way to a wedding. There, a bizarre and seemingly incidental event marks the beginning of a powerful story about a bond and a secret that endures even in death. 
 
Abandoned by her parents shortly after the outbreak of war, sixteen-year-old María Antonia Extarri is left at the mercy of the soldiers. Meanwhile, Isabel enjoys a blissful honeymoon, but just a few months later her valiant Captain is shot as a traitor. Both María and Isabel suddenly find themselves violently altered, alone, and pregnant. A crippled young doctor is the only witness to the mysterious agreement silently formed between the two desperate women.

The Wrong Blood

Eshkol Nevo

It is 1995 and Noa and Amir have decided to move in together. Noa is studying photography in Jerusalem and Amir is a psychology student in Tel Aviv, so they choose a tiny flat in a village in the hills, between the two cities. Their flat is separated from that of their landlords, Sima and Moshe Zakian, by a thin wall, but on each side we find a different home - and a different world. 
 
Homesick is a beautiful, clever and moving story about history, love, family and the true meaning of home.

Homesick

Heinrich Boll

Depicting German life from WW1 until the early 1970s, Boll's novel follows Leni Pfeiffer and her illegitimate son, Lev, as they fight against the demolition of their Cologne apartment building.

Group Portrait With Lady

Michel Houellebecq

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2020 
 
A powerful criticism of modern life by one of the most provocative and prophetic writers of our age 
 
Florent-Claude Labrouste is dying of sadness. Despised by his girlfriend and on the brink of career failure, his last hope for relief comes in the form of a newly available antidepressant that alters the brain's release of serotonin. 
 
When he returns to the Normandy countryside in search of serenity, he instead finds a rural community left behind by globalisation and red-tape agricultural policies, with local farmers longing for an impossible return towhat they remember as a golden age. 
 
'Despite its provocations, this is a novel of romantic and sorrowful ideas: Houellebecq as troubadour, singing lost loves' Rachel Kushner 
 
Michel Houellebecq has good claim to be the most interesting novelist of our times. . . Exhilarating in its nihilism, often very funny and always enjoyable' Evening Standard

Serotonin

Brina Svit

In a brasserie off the Boulevard St-Germain, a renowned novelist watches, entranced, the motions of a young woman's hands folding a restaurant bill into a paper boat. 
 
This passing observation - slim fingers against a white linen tablecloth - provides the springboard for this story of love and jealousy. The novelist's orderly life vanishes the instant he admires this strange woman's hands; the discipline of forty fruitful years dissolves. 
 
On an impulse, he proposes. She answers without hesitation - yes, she will marry him, but only on her terms. She will occupy his house, but not his bed. When she moves in, Kati upends her new husband's meticulous domestic arrangements, then his sanity. Her stubborn detachment transforms the writer from a cool, amused observer of life into a creature ravaged by doubt, passion and jealousy. 
 
With a brutality counterpointed by the elegance and subtlety of Savit's prose, this story dramatises the ruinous consequences of sexual obsession.

Con Brio

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