In Waugh's biting satire of contemporary social life, Tony Last, a modestly well-to-do landowner in the South of England, allows his bored society wife, Brenda, to take an apartment in London. Brenda promptly takes advantage of her situation to begin a love affair with John Beaver, the social-climbing son of her landlady. (Waugh himself had been similarly betrayed by his apparently heartless wife shortly after their marriage.) After the accidental death of her young son, Brenda asks for a divorce, but Tony decides that he wants to leave England for a while to think things over and sets off on an archaeological expedition into the Brazilian rain forest. There his guide is killed in an accident, and Tony himself nearly succumbs to fever. However, he is rescued by an English hunter, who holds Tony prisoner in his camp in the jungle and forces him to read the novels of Charles Dickens aloud to him, over and over. (Waugh actually witnessed a situation something like this on a trip to British Guiana in 1932). Waugh claimed that A HANDFUL OF DUST "contained all I had to say about humanism." It is considered one of his greatest novels.

Unlike the previous books in Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter series, HANNIBAL serves up a personal history of the genius/psychopath/antihero that sheds light on his madness. Set seven years after THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, this next course features a more appetizing Hannibal living a quiet life of luxury in Florence, a down-on-her-luck Clarise Starling demoted to the Behavioral Sciences department of the Bureau after a failed drug bust, and a horrifically disfigured Hannibal the Cannibal survivor bent on vengeance. An Entertainment Weekly Worst Book of 1999 and a 1999 New York Times Notable Book, HANNIBAL appeared on the Publishers Weekly best-seller list for 21 weeks and was adapted into a 2001 film starring Sir Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal and Julianne Moore as Clarice.