Evelyn Waugh's "irresistible" first novel (New York Times) is a brilliant and hilarious satire of English school life in the 1920s.
Sent down from Oxford after a wild, drunken party, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly surprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at a boys' private school in Wales. His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, rascals and fools, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and Captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, floating on a scented breeze. As the farce unfolds in Evelyn Waugh's dazzling debut as a novelist, the young run riot and no one is safe, least of all Paul.
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From the Publisher:
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From the Inside Flap:
Decline and Fall (1928) was Evelyn Waugh's immensely successful first novel, and it displays not only all of its author's customary satiric genius and flair for unearthing the ridiculous in human nature, but also a youthful willingness to train those weapons on any and every thing in his path. In this fractured picaresque comedy of the hapless Paul Pennyfeather stumbling from one disaster to another, Waugh manages the delicious task of skewering every aspect of the society in which he lived.
With an Introduction by Frank Kermode
Sir Frank Kermode, formerly Lord Northcliffe Professor at London University, is now Professor at Cambridge and Columbia Universities. His books include The Uses of and Continuities.
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- PublisherLittle, Brown and Company
- Publication date2012
- ISBN 10 0316216305
- ISBN 13 9780316216302
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages320
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