Brideshead Revisited (Everyman's Library) - Tapa dura

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Soon to be a major motion picture from Miramax Films, starring Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Ben Whishaw, and Matthew Good, and directed by Julian Jarrold. Opens July 2008.

Evelyn Waugh’s most celebrated novel is a memory drama of extraordinary richness and depth. The novel Waugh thought of as his magnum opus, it is the story of the intense entanglement of a young, middle-class Englishman, Charles Ryder, with a wealthy, eccentric Anglo-Catholic family, the Marchmains: in particular, with Sebastian, the flamboyant young man Charles meets at Oxford in the 1920s; and Sebastian’s sister Julia, who will become the great and unrequited love of Charles’s life.

Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the world of Waugh’s own youth, but it is also a story about religious and secular love, about the notions of sin and judgment, guilt and punishment and how, almost unaccountably, they can give shape to one’s life. By turns romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh’s familiar satiric exploration of English society and mores, revealing an elegiac, lyrical writer of the most lucid and profound feeling.

Evelyn Waugh was born in London in 1903. He was the author of several acclaimed works of fiction, including A Handful of Dust, Vile Bodies, Scoop, and the Sword of Honour trilogy. He died in 1966.