He was educated at Grenham House school—where he reported the pupils were subjected to "hellish abuse"[5]—and at Bradfield College, and joined the army when he was 18, but left after four months of the officer training course at Sandhurst.

Before he began to write full-time he held a wide variety of jobs, including being a mechanic, a motorcycle messenger and an English teacher in Colombia.

De Bernières' most famous book is his fourth, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, in which the eponymous hero is an Italian soldier who is part of the occupying force on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the Second World War.

De Bernières strongly disapproved of the film version, commenting, "It would be impossible for a parent to be happy about its baby's ears being put on backwards."

Birds Without Wings (2004) is set in Turkey, and portrays the tragic fate of the diverse people in a small village, who belong to different language-speaking groups and religions, towards the end of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Kemal Atatürk, and the Gallipoli Campaign of the First World War from the Turkish viewpoint.

Notwithstanding is rich in local detail, containing references to the nearby villages and towns of Godalming, Chiddingfold, and Haslemere, as well as to Waitrose, Scats, the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences, the Merry Harriers pub and the "suicidal driving" of the nuns at St Dominic's School.

De Bernières reflects in the Afterword: "I realised that I had set so many of my novels and stories abroad, because custom had prevented me from seeing how exotic my own country is.

In this prequel to the Red Dog, a boy named Mick is sent to the outback to live with his Granpa after a tragedy befalls on him, it looks as if he has a lonely life but while exploring the floodwaters, he finds a lost puppy covered in mud and half-drowned.

Louis de Bernières tells the story of a young boy and his Granpa, and the charismatic and entertaining dog..[11] The Daniel Pitt Trilogy, comprising the three novels The Dust that Falls from Dreams (2015), So Much Life Left Over (2018), and The Autumn of the Ace (2020), follows the life of its central character Daniel Pitt, a flying ace in WWI, and the McCosh family through the 20th century.