A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

Before reading this novel, my sole (and very pleasing) outing with Evelyn Waugh had been the amazing Brideshead Revisited. This one was written in the 1930s (published a decade before Brideshead) and it seems like Waugh managed to get more romantic as he got older? A Handful of Dust is devastatingly cynical and satirical, yet has some really emotionally fraught and stirring moments amid the disillusioned wreckage. Soaked with the atmosphere of 1930s high living, dispassionate, disgusted and unmerciful. Waugh's very British focus on land, ancestry and the confusion caused by the ruin of the pre-WWI way of life is already evident here (and is the focus of the most emotional parts of the novel), and will take centre-stage in Brideshead. I wish I could stop reading it as a stepping-stone to Brideshead, but I'm afraid I'm so in love with that novel that I can't. But a really great read, the indifferent voice of the omnipotent narrator is very successful throughout.