PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

P.G. Wodehouse

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

When O'Hara and Moriarty, two boys at Wrykyn School, tar and feather the statue of a pompous local MP, O'Hara mislays at the scene of their crime a tiny gold bat borrowed from Trevor, captain of the school cricket team. The plot revolves around the fate of this bat and attempts to retrieve it, but the real focus of the novel is a vivid portrayal of school life. Though the setting is an English public school in the years before World War 1, so sharp is Wodehouse's ear for the way children talk that everyone will recognise familiar characters and situations, whatever their place of education.

The Gold Bat

Everyman's Pocket Classics complements highly successful Pocket Poets series, offering the best prose writing in a handy pocket-sized format. Like all Everyman Library books, each title is printed on a cream-wove, acid-free paper with full cloth sewn binding, headbands and silk ribbon marker. Eminently collectable and great gifts.

In this beautifully packaged anthology A. S. Byatt, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Bowen, Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, Anita Desai, Colm Tóibín, Lorrie Moore and many others reflect upon all aspects of motherhood in stories lyrical and satirical, realistic and fantastic, hilarious and heart-breaking. Here at last is a gift-book that is neither sentimental nor 'inspirational', offering instead high-quality literary fiction which will continue to entertain long after the chocolates have been eaten and the flowers thrown away.

Stories of Motherhood

George MacDonald Fraser

For George MacDonald Fraser the bully Flashman was easily the most interesting character in Tom Brown's Schooldays, and imaginative speculation as to what might have happened to him after his expulsion from Rugby School for drunkenness ended in 12 volumes of memoirs in which Sir Harry Paget Flashman - self-confessed scoundrel, liar, cheat, thief, coward -'and, oh yes, a toady' - romps his way through decades of nineteenth-century history in a swashbuckling and often hilarious series of military and amorous adventures. In Flashman the youthful hero, armed with a commission in the 11th Dragoons, is shipped to India, woos and wins the beautiful Elspeth, and reluctantly takes part in the first Anglo-Afghan War, honing a remarkable talent for self-preservation.Flash for Freedom! finds him crewing on an African slave ship, hiding in a New Orleans whorehouse and fortuitously running into rising young American politician Abraham Lincoln...

Flashman, Flash for Freedom!, Flashman in the Great Game

When someone breaks into the cricket pavilion and steals two silver cups, the whole school is agog. Could it possibly be an inside job? Nothing less than the honour of St Austin's is at stake, not to mention the reputation of Jim Thomson, an excellent athlete with a talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.In this charming novel of school life, the first book he published, Wodehouse demonstrates right away a talent for story telling and characterisation, not to mention a sharp ear for the inflections of schoolboy speech, still recognisable after more than a century. But what marks the story out from others of the same sort are the many humorous touches which hint at a master of comedy in the making.

The Pothunters

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

The Prince and Betty

A damsell in distress - an Almost Blandings novel set in Belphi Castle, Hampshire and a two week house party for the son-and-heir's 21st.

A Damsel In Distress

The Honourable Galahad Threepwood has decided to write his memoirs and England's aristocrats are all diving for cover, not least Galahad's formidable sister Lady Constance Keeble who fears that her brother will ruin the family reputation with saucy stories of the 1890s. But Galahad's memoirs are not the only cause for concern. Yet again Lord Emsworth's prize pig has been stolen and, as usual, the castle seems to be buzzing with imposters all pretending to be one another. Love and natural justice triumph in the end, but not before Wodehouse has tangled and unangled a plot of Shakespearean complexity in a novel which might as well be subtitled 'The Price of the Papers'.

Summer Lightning

The action of the novel takes place at the fictional "Beckford College", a private school for boys; the title alludes to the arrival at the school of a mischievous young boy called Farnie, who turns out to be the uncle of the older "Bishop" Gethryn, a prefect, cricketer and popular figure in the school. His arrival, along with that of another youngster who becomes fag to Gethryn, leads to much excitement and scandal in the school, and the disruption of some important cricket matches.

A Prefect's Uncle

In order to save his reputation and the honour of his house at school after he shames himself by running away from a fight between fellow pupils and toughs from the local town, a studious schoolboy takes up the study of boxing. This charming early novel by P. G. Wodehouse plays a series of witty variations on the standard  school story of the period, balancing the minor heroics of the action against a humorously ironic commentary. The simple tale is given sparkle by vivid character drawing and the author’s sharp ear for schoolboy dialogue

The White Feather

The trouble which begins with Gussie Fink-Nottle wandering the streets of London dressed as Mephistopheles reaches its awful climax in his drunken speech to the boys of Market Snodsbury Grammar School. For Bertie Wooster's old friend has fallen in love with Madeline Bassett and, as usual, makes a hash of the affair until Jeeves comes to the rescue. In the meantime, Jeeves must also solve the mystery of the white mess jacket, while sorting out the lives of Bertie's cousin Angela, her mother, and her mother's French chef. In short, a normal working day for that prince among gentlemen's gentlemen in what must be a candidate for the name of the funniest novel in the English language.

Right Ho, Jeeves

In this comic novel - dedicated to Douglas Fairbanks, who starred in the stage version - Jimmy Pitt, man-about-town and former newspaper hound, takes a bet that he cannot commit burglary. He finds breaking and entering easy enough, but then discovers that he has forced his way into the home of a tough New York policeman. Naturally, Captain McEachern has a beautiful daughter and problems of his own. The complications which ensue from their meeting, involving a rich cast of Wodehousean characters from both sides of the Atlantic, create one of his most amusing and light-hearted early novels.

A Gentleman Of Leisure

Take a pig, a fat-headed earl, a country house, several pairs of frustrated lovers, some scheming outsiders, and all sorts of people who aren’t who they say they are. Mix thoroughly and apply the Wodehouse magic. The result is the lightest of literary soufflées, another instalment in the long-running saga of the Threepwood family, including the head of the clan, Lord Emsworth, his virago sister, Lady Constance, and his debonair brother, the Honourable Galahad Threepwood, ex-boulevardier and solver of romantic problems.

Blandings Castle

Here are libraries modest, mobile, mystical (Borges of course) and magical (Helen Oyeyemi's enchanting 'Books and Roses'); public and private, provincial and prestigious. Little that happen in Elizabeth McCracken's eccentric library did not happen in real life - even down to the murder; and it is rumoured that on 3 June 1997 the British Museum Reading Room really was visited by the ghost of Max Beerbohm's obscurest of poets, Enoch Soames... 
Fiction and reality merge in Cortazar's 'A Continuity of Parks'. Characters step out of their books in Fay Weldon's 'Lily Bart's Hat Shop', while Jasper Fforde's Jurisfiction operatives enter Wuthering Heights to deliver a Rage-Counselling session. Charles Lamb muses on the annoying book-borrowing habits of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the teenage Teffi is overawed by Tolstoy; Helene Hanff in Manhattan launches her famous correspondence with a London antiquarian bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road. 
Reading, as the Queen informs an appalled private secretary, is 'untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting'. And also, of course, a lot of fun. Sit comfortably, then, and begin.

Stories of Books and Libraries

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

The Swoop! & The Military Invasion of America

It is the general view at Eckleton school that there never was such a house of slackers as Kay's. Fenn, head of house and county cricketer, does his best to impose some discipline but is continually undermined by his house-master, the meddlesome and ineffectual Mr Kay. After the Summer Concert fiasco, Mr Kay resolves to remove Fenn from office and puts his house into special measures, co-opting Kennedy, second prefect of Blackburn's, as reluctant troubleshooter with a brief to turn the place around. But without the backing of Fenn, and the whole house hostile towards him, how can he achieve the impossible ...?

The Head Of Kay's

A collection of stories featuring familiar Wodehouse characters includes Jeeves and Wooster, Ukridge and his fearsome Aunt Julia, Bingo Little and his wife, romantic novelist Rosie M. Banks, twin Mulliner brothers George (the screenwriter) and Alfred (the conjuror),Galahad Threepwood, dotty Lord Emsworth and his younger son Freddie, the dog-biscuit salesman. In between stories, their creator explores some of the more extraordinary items in the American news of his day.

Plum Pie

This early novel, written in collaboration with a friend, is a fascinating curiosity which suggests that Wodehouse might have become a very different, experimental sort of writer, had he continued to write in the same vein. 
 
Using multiple narrators, playing with literary stereotypes and identities, it tells the story of an aspiring young writer, James Orlebar Cloyster, prepared to do almost anything, first for success and then for gratification. By making Cloyster a mild, affable young man of the sort so familiar in his later novels, Wodehouse creates a comic disparity between the character’s lofty professions of virtue and his unscrupulous behaviour. As the story progresses, we realise that he is not unusual: all the main characters are unscrupulous in one way or another, ready to cheat and lie in pursuit of their ends, hence the title of the book. 
 
Not George Washington contains many fine scenes, and Cloyster’s narrative displays the calm mastery of story-telling Wodehouse had already made his own. If awkwardly executed, it is cleverly plotted, springing several surprises along the way. Clearly autobiographical in origin, it also invites readers to reflect on the nature of talent, fame, failure and success, villainy and honour - themes which continued to recur in the author’s work for another sixty years.

Not George Washington

An early Wodehouse novel, this is both a sporting story and a tale of friendship between two boys at boarding school. Mike (introduced in the novel Mike at Wrykyn) is a seriously good cricketer who forms an unlikely alliance with old Etonian Psmith (‘the P is silent’) after they both find themselves fish out of water at a new school, Sedleigh, where they eventually overcome the hostility of others and their own prejudices to become stars 
 
Even readers uninterested in cricket are likely to be gripped by descriptions of matches, and the plot, though slight, reaches a satisfying conclusion. But the real meat of the book is to be found in the characters, especially the elegant Psmith, one of Wodehouse’s immortal creations, who features in three of his later novels (Psmith in the City, Psmith Journalist, Leave it to Psmith).

Mike and Psmith

It is an intriguing collection, where most of the stories concern relationships, sports and household pets, and interestingly does not feature any of Wodehouse's regular characters; one however, "Extricating Young Gussie", is remarkable as the first appearance of some of Wodehouse's most well-known and beloved characters, Jeeves and his master Bertie Wooster (although here Bertie's surname appears to be Mannering-Phipps, and Jeeves' role is very small), along with Bertie's fearsome Aunt Agatha.

The Man With Two Left Feet

A collection of stories in which familiar characters and places are reintroduced in unfamiliar circumstances, reminding us – if we need reminding – of their author's limitless powers of comic invention. In the title story – one of Wodehouse's longest and best shorter fictions – Lord Emsworth takes his revenge on his ghastly secretary, the Efficient Baxter, setting off a wave of similar reprisals at Blandings Castle with amazing results. In other tales we meet several members of the Drones Club, while the final three reunite us with the ineffable Ukridge, more of whose ever-optimistic schemes for making easy money come to grief. A delightful meeting with old friends for some readers, a superb introduction to the world of Wodehouse for others.

Lord Emsworth And Others

LORD BISKERTON, son and heir of the sixth Earl of Hoddesdon, and known to his friends as Biscuit, had red hair, a preliminary scenario for a moustache and a noble determination to escape the disgrace of work. His friend Berry Conway, however, had succumbed to economic pressure and become the secretary to T. Paterson Frisby, a dyspeptic American who had twenty million and loved every cent of it. When Biscuit and Berry pooled ideas for their mutual betterment, and one idea concerned Ann Moon, Frisby's beautiful niece and heiress, they had to lean heavily on Aunt Vera, an old campaigner in the field of love. How Uncle Paterson was caught short and rushed to cover, while Aunt Vera hedged the market with a double play and salted down two money-making engagements for the House of Hoddesdon, is one of the most irresistible tales of the one and only P. G.

Big Money

When Bertie Wooster goes to stay with his Aunt Dahlia at Brinkley Court and find himself engaged to the imperious Lady Florence Craye, disaster treatens from all sides. While Florence tries to cultivate his mind, her former fiance, hefty policeman Stilton Cheesewright, threatens to beat his body to a pulp, and her new admirer, the bleating poet percy Gorringe, tries to borrow a thousand pounds. To cap it all, Bertie has incurred the disapproval of Jeeves by growing a moustach, thus alienating the only man who can save him from his trip to the altar. Throw in a disappearing pearl necklace, Aunt Dahlia's magazine Milady's Boudir, her cook Anatole, the Drones' dart match, and Mr and Mrs L. G. Trotter from Liverpool, and you have all the ingredients for a classic Wodehouse farce.

Jeeves And The Feudal Spirit

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

The Inimitable Jeeves

Wodehouse's well-known gift for satisfying plots and comic surprises is evident on every page, but there are also signs of his debt to earlier writers in the realistic tradition. Set mainly in London or New York, many of the stories concern ordinary people -  shopassistants, schoolmasters, secretaries, servants, unsuccessful writers  - living the life of rented rooms and cheap cafés Wodehouse knew well from his own experience. Yet there is nothing sad or gloomy about these tales. Far from it: they are brimming with life and energy, beautifully written and invariably delightful. And for Wodehouse addicts there is also a goodly sprinkling of goofy young men about town and their valets to satisfy the strongest appetites

The Man Upstairs

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

Kid Brady Stories & A Man of Means

Oscar Wilde

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Effortlessly achieved, each revealing a different aspect of his brilliance, all of the plays, prose writings, and poems gathered here support Wilde's belief that entertainment provides the best kind of edification. The works include Wilde's once-controversial and now classic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the riotously comic plays &quot;The Importance of Being Earnest&quot; and &quot;Lady Windermere's Fan,&quot; and the famous poem he wrote after being released from prison, &quot;The Ballad of Reading Gaol.&quot; This expanded new edition now includes the complete version of Wilde's moving letter from prison, De Profundis, and his teasing parable about Shakespeare, &quot;The Portrait of Mr. W. H.&quot; Other notable included writings are the semi-comic mystery story &quot;Lord Arthur's Savile's Crime&quot; and the essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism.

Plays, Prose Writings And Poems

A stalwart of the Angler's Rest, where he is usually to be found in company with Miss Postlethwaite the barmaid, Mr Mulliner has an endless supply of brothers, nephews and cousins who feature in the tales with which he entertains the regulars in his favourite pub. There is George, the stammerer, who finds the courage to propose only after being chased by a mob; Wilfred, the chemist, who muddles his cosmetic potions with dire results; Lancelot, the film star; William, the lover of Myrtle Banks; Clarence, the society photographer; and Augustine, the curate, who saves his bishop from disgrace at the school reunion. All win through to love and success, but only after enough farcical mishaps to supply a dozen ordinary comic novelists.

Meet Mr Mulliner

P.G. Wodehouse was, by common consent, the most brilliant writer of English comedy in the 20th century, equally celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. He achieved the unusual distinction of combining the widest possible popularity with the highest literary standards, attracting both the devotion of readers and the respect of his peers from Hilaire Belloc to Graham Greene. Several of his characters have already entered popular mythology. This anthology includes two novels, fourteen short stories and extracts from Wodehouse's autobiography. 
The Code of the Woosters was written in 1938 when Wodehouse was at the height of his powers. The vintage plot involves Bertie Wooster attempting to steal a cream jug from a country house at the behest of his aunt Dahlia - or, as Bertiehimself puts it, 'the sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeleine Bassett, old Pop bassett, Stiffy Byng, the Rev H.P. ('Stinker') Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow-creamer and the small, brown, leather-covered notebook.' The outcome is a dazzlingly intricate plot and a wonderfully satisfying farce. 
Uncle Fred in the Springtime, published in 1939, brings one of the author's favourite characters, Uncle Fred aka Lord Ickenham, to his most celebrated comic location, Blandings Castle, where the dastardly Duke of Dunstable is again attempting to steal Lord Emsworth's prize pig. Called in to thwart the duke, Uncle Fred poses as pompous 'looney-doctor' Sir Roderick Glossop, with complicated results. The short stories feature all Wodehouse's most famous creations - Jeeves and Wooster, Ukridge, Bingo Little, Mr Mulliner, the Earls of Emsworth and Ickenham. Finally, extracts from Over Seventy, a memoir as amusing and beautifully written as the novels, offer an insight into the attitudes and working habits of a very private man.

The Best of Wodehouse

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

Carry On, Jeeves

When Psmith finds himself working in the City for the pompous Mr Bickersdyke, he makes it his mission to bring a little sweetness and light into the bank manager's life. The monocled wit with the suave manner and the chivalrous but devil-may-care attitude to life is determined not to let honest toil depress him. The consequence is a series of battles in which Bickersdyke comes off worst and Wodehouse's readers best.

Psmith In The City

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

Little Black Classics Box Set

Penguin Modern Box Set

Frankenstein

An illustration from the book There's An Elf in Your Book and The Christmasaurus

Children's quizzes

Are you on Santa's naughty or nice list?

There's An Alien in You Book by Tom Fletcher

Extracts

There’s an Alien in Your Book by Tom Fletcher

The Creakers by Tom Fletcher

An image of several space books for kids on a dark purple background with rocket, planet and star doodles around them

Children's reading lists

11 out-of-this-world space books for kids

75 Christmas books for kids

An image of a selection of spooky children's books on a dark purple background with an orange shape which features a zig-zag pattern

32 spooky books to read this Halloween

A photo of the book The Christmasaurus by Tom Fletcher on a wooden background next to  some presents and a candy cane

The Christmasaurus by Tom Fletcher

A picture of a several different books by Tom Fletcher on a light blue and red background

Where to start with Tom Fletcher’s books

An image of a selection of funny books for under 5s on a purple background with white dotted lines

14 books that will make under 5s giggle

Space Band by Tom Fletcher

A photo of a copy of The Christmasaurus and the Winter Witch by Tom Fletcher on a light blue background alongside white paper snowflakes

The Christmasaurus and the Winter Witch by Tom Fletcher

Reading lists

The best dystopian books of all time

85 books to read before you're 12

Christmas gifts for 2025: Books for under 5s

An image of a selection of books for under 5s on an orange background with a large splodge and cloud print

24 must-read books for under 5s

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

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

A photo of a selection of children's crime books on a red background with a magnifying glass hovering over the book The London Mystery by Siobhan Dowd

Showing results for: ‘tom fletcher there's a in your book’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter