Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh (Penguin, £6.99 in UK)

This is Waugh's second novel, published in 1930. It is a strange, horribly funny, anxious work reflecting the moral lassitude of the post Great War generation, as well as the sense of foreboding that was to be the mark of the coming decade. The story is complicated and not always successfully brought off, but the setpieces - the opening on board a cross Channel ferry, the car race, the comedy of errors when the hero, Adam, asks the egregious Colonel Blount for his daughter's hand - are superb. The closing chapter, called "Happy Ending", is surreal: "On a splintered tree stump in the biggest battlefield in the history of the world, Adam sat down and read a letter from Nina This edition is edited, with an introduction and notes, by Richard Jacobs; the scholarly paraphernalia would have amused Waugh.