The Novel Index

Where to start with Evelyn Waugh

British novelist, 1903–1966.

Best Evelyn Waugh book to start with: Brideshead Revisited (1945), on 5 of the 16 lists it could have made.

Brideshead Revisited is the lists’ choice, but Scoop is the better first Waugh. It is shorter and quicker, a comedy about a nature columnist who is sent by mistake to cover a war in a fictional African country. The jokes arrive on every page.

Brideshead Revisited, the lists’ favourite, is longer and more elegiac, about a young man drawn into a rich Catholic family, and a book to read when you have time to settle into it.

Decline and Fall, his first novel, is as funny as Scoop: a young man is thrown out of Oxford and takes a job at a terrible school. A Handful of Dust is the bleakest of the four, about a country marriage coming apart, and it is the one to read last.

Evelyn Waugh
Photo: Carl Van Vechten, public domain

Evelyn Waugh's books, ranked best first

Brideshead Revisited comes first, on 5 of the 16 lists it could have made, followed by Scoop and A Handful of Dust.

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Evelyn Waugh's novels in order

The earliest on our lists is Decline and Fall (1928), and the most recent is Brideshead Revisited (1945).

  1. 1928 Decline and Fall
  2. 1934 A Handful of Dust
  3. 1938 Scoop
  4. 1945 Brideshead Revisited

Novels on at least one of our 30 lists. Not a complete bibliography.

Also on one list

One more of Evelyn Waugh's novels is on one of our lists.

Lists used on this page