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. Read by Jeremy Irons, star of the acclaimed 1981 television series based on the novel.
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.
"A genuine literary masterpiece." --Time
"Heartbreakingly beautiful...The twentieth century's finest English novel." --Los Angeles Times
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"This is a book to read slowly to savor Mr Waugh's style of writing. His complex sentences describe not only physical surroundings, but emotions, thoughts and self-evaluation. His characters are so well defined and portray the aristrocratic society in England between the world wars. You follow the lives of the Marchmains of Brideshead through turbulent years. I was sorry when the book ended and I do plan on re-reading it again in the future."
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Vionna (5 out of 5 stars)