Evelyn Waugh

Set in 1920's England, the story examines the wealthy Flyte family through the eyes of Sebastian Flyte's less wealthy school friend Charles Ryder, who is eventually tempted into an extramarital affair with Sebastian's sister, Lady Julia. The novel is a story of faith and disillusionment in a glamorous upper-class world.

Upper-class scoundrel Basil Seal, mad, bad, and dangerous to know, creates havoc wherever he goes, much to the despair of the three women in his life-his sister, his mother, and his mistress. When Neville Chamberlain declares war on Germany, it seems the perfect opportunity for more action and adventure. So Basil follows the call to arms and sets forth to enjoy his finest hour-as a war hero. Basil's instincts for self-preservation come to the fore...

Evelyn Waugh's personal favorite of his novels and "a superlatively well done book" (Chicago Tribune) set in the age of Emperor Constantine.
Helena is the intelligent, horse-mad daughter of a British chieftain who is thrown into marriage with the man who will one day become the Roman emperor Constantius. Leaving home for lands unknown, she spends her adulthood seeking truth in the religions, mythologies, and philosophies of the declining...

"The very model of the modern paranoid novel" (New York Times) and an ambitious work of semi-autobiographical fiction from one of England's greatest novelists.
Gilbert Pinfold is a reclusive Catholic novelist suffering from acute inertia. In an attempt to defeat insomnia he has been imbibing an unappetizing cocktail of bromide, chloral, and creme de menthe. He books a passage on the SS Caliban and, as it cruises towards Ceylon,...

Selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century, this "absolutely delightful" novel (New York Times) movingly and comically chronicles the breakdown of a marriage and the disintegration of English society in the years after World War I.

After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last has grown bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband,...

"A wickedly witty and iridescent novel" (Time) from one of England's greatest satirists takes aim at the generation of Bright Young Things that dominated London high society in the 1920s.
In the years following the First World War a new generation emerged, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of 1920s London, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercised their inventive minds...

A Londoner of lower class befriends and begins a romantic relationship with an aristocrat that becomes complicated when the aristocrat introduces his new friend to his sister.

Follow the exploits of Paul Pennyfeather, whose unfair expulsion from Oxford kick-starts a disastrous series of events, wherein he is by turn a naive teacher, a celebrity bridegroom, a wanted fugitive, and an international white slave-trader.

A "lavishly entertaining" (Publishers Weekly) distillation of Waugh's genius—abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form.
Evelyn Waugh's short fiction reveals in miniaturized perfection the elements that made him the greatest satirist of the twentieth century. The stories collected here range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British...