Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited (1945) is Waugh's most celebrated novel. Captain Charles Ryder, billeted at Brideshead Castle during World War II, remembers his long entanglement with the Marchmain family — first his passionate friendship with the charming, dissolute Sebastian at Oxford, then his affair with Sebastian's sister Julia. A meditation on the inescapable pull of faith, the passing of the English aristocracy, and the persistence of grace in a secular age.