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

Mya-Rose Craig

Discover Mya-Rose Craig's moving and life-affirming memoir about family, searching for rare birds, and the power of our natural world. 
 
'Lyrical, poignant and insightful' MARGARET ATWOOD (on Twitter) 
'Filled with hope and energy' Guardian 
 
In her memoir, Mya-Rose Craig and her family travel the world in search of rare birds and astonishing landscapes. But a shadow moves with them, too - her mother's deepening mental health crisis. In the face of this struggle, the Craigs turn to nature again and again, and every time it offers joy and stillness. 
 
On these journeys, Mya-Rose also witnesses the inequality and destruction we are inflicting on our fragile planet. And so, through the simple, mindful act of looking for birds, she becomes ever more determined to campaign for all our survival. 
 
'A delightful account of a young life devoted to birding - and the fight to save birds and the places they live' Stephen Moss 
 
* Winner of a Somerset Maugham Award * 
* Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Conservation Writing * 
* Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize *

Birdgirl

Discovering the Power of Our Natural World

Marie-Elsa R. Bragg

A unique, intimate and beautiful exploration of grief, loss, healing and faith 
 
'This is a beautiful book, a remarkable, cadenced recollection of how grief lives in the body. It is poetry as a kind of dance. You have to read it' EDMUND DE WAAL 
 
We sat in the kitchen across the small wooden table from each other. She cried like banks bursting, then silence; like winds blowing through her shoulders, chest bouncing, then long shallow breaths. She ruptured and I watched, still, emotionless. 'You must stop crying.' 
 
When Marie-Elsa was just six years old, her mother took her own life. Now, many years later, she returns to that night. Going back to that moment, inhabiting this defining tragedy, allows for an exploration of the grief but also brings healing. 
 
Written partly as a series of unsent letters to both her mother and father, Sleeping Letters is a way of connecting to past family, an attempt to reconcile with loss, as well as a radical exploration of Marie-Elsa&rsquo;s own faith. It is an unforgettable book, with a luminous sense of a daughter&rsquo;s loss. 
 
With a Foreword by Rowan Williams 
 
&lsquo;Truly remarkable... This book carries its readers to a place where inhibitions and fears about loss and death give way to something more hopeful and, in their own way, real&rsquo; Daily Telegraph

Sleeping Letters

On Grief, Loss, Healing and Faith

Rachel Hewitt

'Heartfelt, passionate, infuriating and often devastating, this book will inspire you to fight for your right to tread your own path' CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ, author of Invisible Women 
 
When Rachel loses five family members in five months, grief magnifies other absences. Running across moors and mountains used to help her feel at home in her body but now feels fraught with danger. 
 
Rachel goes in search of a new family: the foremothers who blazed a trail at the dawn of outdoor sport. She discovers Lizzie Le Blond who scaled the Alps in woollen skirts and photographed fearless women climbing, skating and tobogganing at breakneck speeds. Telling Lizzie's story alongside her own, Rachel runs her way from bereavement to belonging, inspired by the tenacious women, past and present, who insist that breaking boundaries outdoors is, and always has been, in her nature. 
 
‘A book of limitless curiosity and eloquent passion’ The Times

In Her Nature

How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors

Charlotte Raven

Edward Wild

'Searingly honest and important' RACHEL CLARKE 
 
Honest, intelligent and unsentimental, Patient 1 is a startling self-portrait written with wit and vulnerability, and a unique testament to the power of hope in the face of illness. 
 
Charlotte Raven had never heard of Huntington's Disease when, in her mid-thirties, she discovered that her father was suffering from the illness. Life for her and her young family would never be the same again. 
 
Frank and fearless, this is her memoir of coming to terms with this inherited neurodegenerative disease and its impact on her body, mind and memory. It is at once an act of self-preservation and a kind of reckoning: with the illness, with the person she once was and with the person she is now. 
 
 In an afterword, Raven's doctor Ed Wild - one of the country's leading experts in Huntington's - explains how doctors and patients like Charlotte are working together in the hope of one day eliminating this disease altogether. 
 
'Insightful, frank and often moving...Raven writes with humour...and no small amount of courage' Guardian 
 
Shortlisted for the RSL Christopher Bland Prize 2022

Patient 1

Forgetting and Finding Myself

Frances Stonor Saunders

*Winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize 2022* 
 
'This is family history at its best... the words fizz off the page and flutter in the mind' Sunday Times 
 
If you open that suitcase you'll never close it again. 
 
Ten years ago, Frances Stonor Saunders was handed an old suitcase filled with her father's papers. Her father's life had been a study in borders - exiled from Romania during the war, to Turkey then Egypt and eventually Britain, and ultimately to the borderless territory of Alzheimer's. The unopened suitcase seems to represent everything that had made her father unknowable to her in life. 
 
So begins a captivating exploration of history, memory and geography, as Frances Stoner Saunders decides to unpick her family's past.

The Suitcase

Six Attempts to Cross a Border

Sarah Gabriel

After a troubled upbringing that saw the early death of her mother from cancer, Sarah Gabriel had created a happy home life with her partner and two beautiful daughters. Then, at 44, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and learned that while you can turn your back on your past, you can't escape your genetic legacy. The problem was MI8T, a rare and deadly genetic mutation that was responsible for the death of her mother and countless female ancestors. 
 
In Gabriel's struggle for survival, she takes us on a white-knuckle ride through contemporary genetics, the rigours of her treatment for cancer, and the impact of the disease on her family's dynamics. It is a fight not just for physical survival, but for identity, for sanity, for hope. 
 
Laced with black humour, written with a mixture of passion and clinical accuracy, Eating Pomegranates is an intensely powerful and moving memoir about mothers, daughters and breast cancer that is as beautiful as it is brutal.

Eating Pomegranates

A Memoir of Mothers, Daughters and Genes

Niall Griffiths

Sixteen-year-old Grace has dreams, and she knows how to make them come true: a little silicone and surgery here and there –nose, breasts, lips, hair, teeth, nails. 
 
 Then with the right clothes and a new tan she’ll be ready: ready to be seen, consumed and adored by millions. Grace will become a celebrity. 
 
 Someone, though, remembers her as an ordinary, pretty schoolgirl living in a rural paradise: a place of simple, natural beauty. When he sees how utterly Grace has changed, he realises how far the world has fallen since those days. The collision of their two lives, their two very different trajectories, can only end in catastrophe.

A Great Big Shining Star

Julia Blackburn

Winner of the J. R. Ackerley Award 
 
This is the story of three people: Julia Blackburn, her father Thomas and her mother Rosalie. Thomas was a poet and an alcoholic, who for many years was addicted to barbiturates; Rosalie, a painter, was sociable and flirtatious. After her parents were divorced, Julia's mother took in lodgers, always men, on the understanding that each should become her lover. When one of the lodgers started an affair with Julia, Rosalie was devastated; when he later committed suicide the relationship between mother and daughter was shattered irrevocably. 
 
Or so it seemed until the spring of 1999, when Rosalie, diagnosed with leukaemia, came to live with Julia for the last month of her life.

The Three of Us

A Family Story

Suzanne O'Sullivan

'I loved it. She is in my view the best science writer around - a true descendant of Oliver Sacks' Sathnam Sanghera, author of The Boy with the Topknot 
 
 
The brain is the most complex structure in the universe. 
 
In Brainstorm the Wellcome Prize-winning author of It’s All in Your Head uncovers the most eye-opening symptoms medicine has to offer. 
 
‘Powerfully life-affirming... Brainstorm is testament to O'Sullivan's unshowy clarity of thought and her continued marvelling at the mysteries of the brain’ Guardian 
 
 
Brainstorm examines the stories of people whose symptoms are so strange even their doctor struggles to know how to solve them. A man who sees cartoon characters running across the room; a teenager who one day arrives home with inexplicably torn clothes; a girl whose world turns all Alice in Wonderland; another who transforms into a ragdoll whenever she even thinks about moving. 
 
 
The brain is the most complex structure in the universe, and neurologists must puzzle out life-changing diagnoses from the tiniest of clues – it’s the ultimate in medical detective work. In this riveting book, one of the UK’s leading neurologists takes you with her as she follows the trail of her patients’ symptoms: feelings of déjà vu lead us to a damaged hippocampus; spitting and fidgeting to the right temporal lobe; fear of movement to a brain tumour; a missed heart beat to the limbic system. 
 
 
It’s a journey that will open your eyes to the unfathomable intricacies of the brain, and the infinite variety of human capacity and experience.

Brainstorm

Detective Stories From the World of Neurology

Rachel Aviv

There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which&hellip; 
 
Strangers to Ourselves shares the experiences of five people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. It asks, do the stories we tell around mental illness affect its course, its outcomes, even our identities? 
 
Drawing on in-depth reporting, written testimonies and formative events in her own childhood, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a subtle, compassionate, revelatory account of how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress.

Strangers to Ourselves

Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us

Ruth Fitzmaurice

‘I Found My Tribe is inspiring, humbling and a picture of what love really looks like’ Marian Keyes 
 
An invocation to all of us to love as hard as we can, and live even harder, I Found My Tribe is an urgent and uplifting letter to a husband, family, friends, the natural world and the brightness of life. 
 
Ruth’s tribe are her lively children and her filmmaker husband, Simon, who has Motor Neurone Disease and can only communicate with his eyes. Ruth’s other ‘tribe’ are the friends who gather at the cove in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, and regularly throw themselves into the freezing cold water, just for kicks. 
 
 ‘The Tragic Wives’ Swimming Club’, as they jokingly call themselves, meet to cope with the extreme challenges life puts in their way, not to mention the monster waves rolling over the horizon. 
 
‘Fitzmaurice tells her story in sparkling prose that is as sinewy as her new sea-strengthened body, and as admirable and boundless as her spirit’, Sunday Times 
 
‘Uplifting and life-affirming’ Stylist

I Found My Tribe

Sarah Perry

**WINNER OF THE NERO BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION 2025***LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2026*‘Please read this book. It may very well change how you live’ Rachel Clarke‘Filled with love…I was spellbound’ Kathryn Mannix‘Brilliant…so special’ GuardianSarah Perry’s father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. He was in some ways a very ordinary man: he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels and his local church. Yet as Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David through his final days, they realised how extraordinary he really was.This loving, clear-eyed and unforgettable book shows how death may be met and understood as a part of life – a universal experience that is terrible and beautiful, intimate and real, sometimes all at once.*A Book of the Year for The Times, Guardian, Financial Times and Observer*‘Beautiful and profound and completely gripping’ Mark Haddon‘A must-read’ The Times‘We cannot be but somewhat changed by this remarkable book’ Telegraph‘This book will be a lifeline for so many people’ Seán Hewitt‘Perry is in a league of her own’ Sara Collins

Death of an Ordinary Man

David Grossman

An epic, deeply moving novel about the power of love and loving with courage - from the Man Booker International Prize-winning author of A Horse Walks into a Bar 
 
 On a kibbutz in Israel in 2008, Gili is celebrating the ninetieth birthday of her grandmother Vera, the adored matriarch of a sprawling and tight-knit family. But festivities are interrupted by the arrival of Nina: the iron-willed daughter who rejected Vera's care; and the absent mother who abandoned Gili when she was still a baby. 
 
 Nina's return to the family after years of silence precipitates an epic journey from Israel to the desolate island of Goli Otok, formerly part of Yugoslavia. It was here, five decades earlier, that Vera was held and tortured as a political prisoner. And it is here that the three women will finally come to terms with the terrible moral dilemma that Vera faced, and that permanently altered the course of their lives. 
 
 More Than I Love My Life is a sweeping story about the power of love and loving with courage. A novel driven by faith in humanity even in our darkest moments, it asks us to confront our deepest held beliefs about a woman's duty to herself and to her children. 
 
 'Grossman's work resonates with emotional intelligence, humanity and truth' Irish Times

More Than I Love My Life

Claire Eastham

'An electric, warm, comforting and funny handbook on panic and how to cope and live alongside it' Laura Dockrill, author of What Have I Done? 
 
Award-winning blogger and author Claire Eastham is an expert on panic. She's not a doctor or an academic, but over a seven-year period, she has experienced 371 panic attacks (and counting), and learnt a thing or two along the way. 
 
 Part memoir, part guide, How I Learned to Live with Panic is an intimate, honest and ultimately uplifting exploration into panic attacks. In practical thematic chapters Claire covers the crisis points where panic can hit and interviews a host of people - scientists, professors, dieticians, psychologists and people who struggle with panic - to anatomise how it can be managed. 
 
 Frank, funny and blazing, Claire's story will speak to all those seeking to reclaim their lives. 
 
'I wish I had this book when I was 18... It's smart, witty, informative and, importantly, it lets you know that if you have panic attacks too...you are not alone' Dr Sophie Mort, author of A Manual For Being Human

How I Learned to Live With Panic

an honest and intimate exploration on how to cope with panic attacks

Katalin Karikó

Katalin Karikó began life as a butcher’s daughter in communist Hungary. Raised in a one-room home of clay and straw with no running water, she saw potential everywhere: in the promise of a seed, in the alchemy of soap, in the scarlet of a carcass. 
 
Breaking Through is the extraordinary story of her courageous determination – first to become a scientist, and then to unlock an elusive molecule she believed could revolutionise medicine. Others disagreed, and for decades she endured demotions, discrimination and even threats of deportation. Yet Karikó persevered, ultimately making a world-shifting discovery: the mRNA vaccine technology that saved millions of lives and will transform healthcare forever.

Breaking Through

A Memoir

My Life In Science

Catherine Coldstream

‘Evocative’ Sarah Perry 
‘Immersive’ Katherine May 
‘Profoundly moving’ Mark Haddon 
 
Discover Catherine Coldstream’s compelling account of life as a nun in the 1990s, and the dramatic events which led to her flight from the monastery. 
 
After the shock of her father’s death, and with the rest of her family scattered, Catherine was left grieving and alone at twenty-four. A search for meaning led her to the nuns of Akenside Priory. 
 
Here she found a tight-knit community of dedicated women and peace in an ancient way of life. But as she surrenders to her final vows, all is not as it seems behind the Priory’s closed doors. 
 
Catherine comes to realise that divine authority is mediated through flawed and all-too-human channels. She is faced with a dilemma: should she protect the serenity she has found, or speak out? 
 
‘Gripping… A rich memoir’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘Absorbing and beautifully written’ Financial Times

Cloistered

My Years as a Nun

Martin Rowson

A few months after two of his parents had died, Martin Rowson had a dream about the house he grew up in which was crammed with tons and tons of stuff, both physical and emotional. In this book Rowson delves into all that 'stuff'; weaving together dreams, family anecdotes and gossip, jokes, advice, history, smells, sounds and sights of the past. The result is a funny, thought-provoking and ultimately moving meditation on families, life, love, disease and the existentialist horrors of clearing out the attic.

Stuff

A Memoir of Death and Life

Norah Vincent

In Norah Vincent's acclaimed first book she described how she spent eighteen months disguised as a man, an experience that ended on a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital. She left determined to learn more about the world of psychiatry and to examine whether different mental institutions would offer different solutions to their patients, but rather than researching it as a journalist she chose to experience it as a patient. 
 
Her journey begins in a huge inner-city hospital, before moving to the calming green carpet of St Lukes where patients are offered a room of their own and a regular jog in the park. From there she moves to Mobius, and a Buddhist-inspired brand of healing where she is forced to swim through West Coast psychobabble to some unexpected conclusions. The result is a fearless and unprecedented view of mental health care - from the inside out.

Voluntary Madness

My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin

Sarah Ruhl

'Her story is intimate and revealing about what it is to smile and what it means when you can't' Cynthia Nixon 
 
The extraordinary story of one woman's ten-year odyssey that brought her physical, creative, emotional, and spiritual healing. 
 
With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell's palsy patients experience a full recovery, like her own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theatre, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges. So she begins an intense decade-long search for a cure while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face - one that, while recognisably her own, is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions. 
 
Smile is Ruhl's piercing, witty, lucid chronicle of her journey. She explores the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, the pain of postpartum depression, the story of a marriage, being a playwright and working mother to three small children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of illness. 
 
Brimming with insight, humility, warmth and humour, Smile is a triumph: an intimate examination of loss and reconciliation, and above all else, the importance of perseverance and hope in the face of adversity.

Smile

The Story of a Face

Jon Harvey

A BBC Arts & The Reading Agency's Big Sporting Read selection 
 
'Warm, sad and funny... There is something very eccentric and British about A Fan for All Seasons' - Sunday Times 
 
A hilarious, heartfelt, nostalgia-infused story of sport, loss and the journey of a lifetime. 
 
After the sudden death of his older brother, Dan, Jon Harvey turned to the thing that had provided their strongest connection: sport, in all its myriad sublime and ridiculous forms. He made it his mission to visit as many events as he possibly could in a single year – to build the ultimate season ticket. 
 
A kaleidoscopic twelve months took him from London Olympia to ancient Olympia, from rugby balls to Rubik's Cubes, Wimbledon tennis to Wimbledon greyhounds, from tennis legend Roger Federer to darts hero Martin 'Wolfie' Adams, and much, much more. It's a celebration, of sport, life, and an unbreakable bond between two brothers.

A Fan for All Seasons

A Journey Through Life and Sport

Genevieve Fox

Honest, heartrending and full of humour, this is an extraordinary memoir about an unconventional childhood and the absurdities of the cancer experience. It is also, most importantly, a celebration of life. 
 
When Genevieve Fox finds a lump in her throat, she turns up for the hospital diagnosis in a party frock. I can’t have cancer, she thinks. I’ve done my hair. But there is another reason she can’t countenance cancer. She was orphaned by it at the age of nine. 
 
Fox’s story weaves together past and present as she recalls her rackety, unconventional childhood, while also facing the spectre of being lost to her young boys. Yet she confronts her treatment with the same sassy survival instinct that characterised her childhood misadventures. She takes life’s precariousness and turns it on its head. 
 
‘Life-enhancing… Original and wonderful’ 
 Sunday Telegraph 
 
‘Exquisite and tender’ 
 SARAH PERRY

Milkshakes and Morphine

A Memoir of Love and Life

A Memoir of Love and Loss

Candia McWilliam

Candia McWilliam had just joined the judging panel of the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2006 when she started to lose her sight. The gradual onset of blindness seemed especially cruel to someone whose life depended on reading and writing. As McWilliam's sight disappeared she looked inwards and began to remember her Edinburgh childhood, her mother's suicide, her teenage escape into another identity, her marriages, her children and, stalking all these memories, her increasing alcoholism. 
 
What To Look For In Winter is a magical, uplifting and truly wise book about families and friendship, love and loss and that most elusive of things - a sense of self.

What to Look for in Winter

Jane Shilling

Middle age took Jane Shilling by surprise. She hadn't seen it coming, and she certainly wasn't ready for it. Living a flawed, bittersweet version of the idyll she dreamed of in her twenties, in a tumbledown urban cottage by the Thames, with a son, a cat and a horse in a livery fifty miles away, she wondered whether middle age was the beginning of the end. Or was there one last great adventure to be had? 
 
The Stranger in the Mirror is one woman's attempt to understand what middle age means for her and whether, as a new generation of women turns fifty, a revolution is under way. It definitely won't reverse the signs of ageing - but it will make you laugh, it will make you think and it could just make you look in the mirror in a slightly different way...

The Stranger in the Mirror

A Memoir of Middle Age

Richard Beard

*WINNER OF THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 2018* 
 
My younger brother’s name is Nicholas Beard. He was nine years old, and I was with him in the water when he drowned. 
 
Life changes in an instant. 
 
On a family holiday in Cornwall in 1978, Richard and Nicholas are in the sea, jumping the waves. Suddenly and inexplicably Nicholas is out of his depth and then, shockingly, so is Richard. Only one of the brothers returns to the shore. 
 
Richard does not attend Nicholas’s funeral and afterwards the family return to Cornwall to continue the holiday. Soon they stop speaking of that day at the beach altogether. Years later, haunted by grief, Richard sets out to piece together the story. Who was Nicholas? What really happened that day? And why did the family never speak of it again? 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2018 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2018 
 
‘This captivating book, both heart-rending and jaw-dropping, unfolds like a detective story’ Daily Mail 
 
‘A memoir of real truth and heartbreaking emotional heft’ Sunday Times

The Day That Went Missing

Henry Marsh

**BBC DOCUMENTARY CONFESSIONS OF A BRAIN SURGEON IS OUT NOW** 
 
From the No.1 bestselling author of Do No Harm, an entrancing and uplifting meditation on the gift of life. 
 
‘A book to treasure and reread’ Gavin Francis, author of Adventures in Human Being 
 
As a retired brain surgeon, Henry Marsh thought he understood illness, but even he was unprepared for the impact of his diagnosis of advanced cancer. 
 
In And Finally, he navigates the bewildering transition from doctor to patient. As the days pass, his mind turns to his career, to the people and places he has known, and to creative projects still to be completed. 
 
Yet he is also more entranced than ever by the mysteries of science and nature, by his love for his family, and – most of all – by what it is to be alive. 
 
* A Daily Telegraph, The Times and Financial Times Book of the Year * 
 
‘Magnificent’ Rachel Clarke 
 
‘Vividly wry and honest’ The Times 
 
‘I admire this book enormously’ Philip Pullman 
 
‘Enthralling’ Guardian

And Finally

A Neurosurgeon’s Reflections on Life

Matters of Life and Death, the Sunday Times bestseller from the author of DO NO HARM

Alexandra Fuller

The story of a mother grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child - from the bestselling memoirist of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight 
 
** Pulitzer Prize Finalist 2025 in Memoir/Autobiography ** 
 
'Truly extraordinary' HELEN MACDONALD 
 
‘A profound and gripping memoir about surviving unexpected, devastating loss’ SUNDAY TIMES 
 
‘A mesmeric celebration... Will help others surviving loss — surviving life' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel. 
 
And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep. 
 
From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

A Memoir of My Son

Keggie Carew

Discover a daughter's journey into her father's past in this Sunday Times bestseller and winner of the 2016 Costa Biography Award. 
 
Keggie Carew grew up under the spell of an unorthodox, enigmatic father. An undercover guerrilla agent during the Second World War, in peacetime he lived on his wits and dazzling charm. But these were not always enough to sustain a family. 
 
As his memory began to fail, Keggie embarked on a quest to unravel his story once and for all. Dadland is that journey. It takes us into shadowy corners of history, a madcap English childhood, the poignant breakdown of a family, the corridors of dementia and beyond. 
 
'OH THIS BOOK. Beautiful and fierce and brave. Memory and war and family and loss and, well, wow' Helen Macdonald, bestselling author of H is for Hawk 
 
'A thrilling history of Churchill's Special Operations Executive... combined ingeniously with a tender, moving, funny portrait of the author's father' Nick Hornby, Observer

Dadland

A Journey into Uncharted Territory

Roddy Doyle

Love and marriage, children and family, death and grief. Life touches everyone the same, but living under lockdown? It changes us alone. 
 
A man abroad wanders the stag-and-hen-strewn streets of Newcastle, as news of the virus at home asks him to question his next move. An exhausted nurse struggles to let go, having lost a much-loved patient in isolation. A middle-aged son, barred from his mother's funeral, wakes to an oncoming hangover of regret. Told with Doyle's signature warmth, wit and extraordinary eye for the richness that underpins the quiet of our lives, Life Without Children cuts to the heart of how we are all navigating loss, loneliness and the shifting of history underneath our feet. 
 
'Life Without Children is boldly exhilarating, with its revelations of quiet love and the sheer charm of the characters' voices' Sunday Times 
 
'Quietly devastating...shivers with emotion' Financial Times 
 
'In the stripping away of everyday anxieties, the virus reveals what matters most, those qualities that are always at the heart of Doyle's fiction: love and connection' Observer 
 
'Moving...and beautiful' Daily Mail

Life Without Children

The exhilarating new short story collection from the Booker Prize-winning author

Stories

Antoine Leiris

'A beacon of hope in a dark world' Cathy Rentzenbrink, on international bestseller You Will Not Have My Hate 
 
A moving account of single fatherhood in the wake of bereavement. 
 
When Antoine Leiris lost his wife, Hélène, in a terrorist attack in Paris, he was left to care for their baby alone. In this wry and honest book Antoine talks about how they have both fared since that terrible day. 
 
Grief is a succession of transformations. Four years later, I am no longer the same man. The same is true for Melvil. He isn't a baby anymore, but a happy little boy. 
 
Life, After follows a single father learning how to create a happy home for his son. From imagining the reviews he might receive as a parent, to dealing with the complicated emotions that arise around a new relationship and talking to children about bereavement, Antoine charts the course of their life together with remarkable humour and self-awareness. 
 
At times heartbreaking and at times vibrating with the joy of the companionship of a lively little boy, Life, After finds a way to answer the question 'How can I go on?' 
 
That is when it begins. Life, after.

Life, After

Laura Dockrill

'Such a raw, honest and important book' Giovanna Fletcher 
 
Like any new mum, Laura Dockrill felt rather overwhelmed after the birth of her son. But a slow recovery, sleep deprivation and anxiety quickly escalated into postpartum psychosis, and she had to spend a fortnight in a psych ward, separated from her family. It was only when Laura began to put her ordeal into words that she began to find herself again, and recovery seemed within reach. 
 
This is Laura's raw, honest and life-affirming story of how she made it through one of the most frightening experiences a mother can face. Now, she wants to break down the silence around postnatal mental health, shatter the idealised expectations of perfect motherhood, and show all new struggling parents that they are not alone. 
 
'A book to save a whole generation of women' Adele 
 
A pleasure to read...I didn't want to put it down. If anyone is going through a similar experience it will make them feel less alone' Philippa Perry 
 
'A humbingly honest and human war report from the front lines of mothering psychosis and recovery; there is no other book like it' Caitlin Moran 
 
'An incredibly powerful book' Jessie Ware 
 
'This book will give women and their families confidence that the brain and body will heal' Dr Jessica Heron, CEO of Action on Postpartum Psychosis 
 
'An amazing read' Fiona Telford, postpartum psychosis survivor

What Have I Done?

Motherhood, Mental Illness & Me

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

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter