Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder - Softcover

Waugh, Evelyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316216453 ISBN 13: 9780316216456

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 2012

Synopsis

Selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century and called "Evelyn Waugh's finest achievement" by the New York Times, Brideshead Revisited is a stunning exploration of desire, duty, and memory.

The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece--a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire.

Through the story of Charles Ryder's entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh's early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.

About this title

Review:

"A many-faceted book....beuatifully told by one of the most exhilarating stylists of our time."--Newsweek

"Heartbreakingly beautiful....The 20th century's finest English novel."--Los Angeles Times

"A genuine literary masterpiece....Brideshead Revisited is actually a wildly entertaining, swooningly funny-sad story about an iumpressionable young man, Charles Ryder, who goes to Oxford in the 1930s and falls in love with a family: the wealthy, eccentric, aristocratic Flytes, owners of a grand old country house called Brideshead....Told in flashbacks from the dark days of World War II, the novel is aglimmer with the guttering candle glow of an elegant age that was already passing away."--Lev Grossman, TIME

"Evelyn Waugh's finest achievement."--John K. Hutchens, New York Times

From the Publisher:

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

About this edition

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0316216453
• ISBN 13: 9780316216456
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 402