A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Dust (1934) is Waugh's bleakest and most perfectly constructed satire. Tony Last, a decent, dull English gentleman, watches helplessly as his wife Brenda drifts into an affair with the worthless John Beaver. What follows — through divorce, a death, and an ill-fated expedition to the Amazon — is one of the darkest endings in English fiction, a parable about the collapse of civilized values told with savage comic precision.