A Handful of Dust (Penguin Modern Classics)

Time's 100 Best English Novels (100 books items)

"Devoted to his wife, Brenda, his son, John Andrew, and to Hetton, his very ugly neo-Gothic homestead, Tony Last will lose all three. As his name is always announcing, Last lives at the end of a dying age, the brittle, exhausted 1930s, when England, at least Waugh's England, is a place where Brenda can throw herself at the feet of a childish lover and where Last can discard his life on an absurd caprice. Waugh's own marriage was disintegrating when he wrote this, and his unhappiness led him into "