Classics · DarkTony Last's marriage collapses when his wife takes a lover, and he joins an expedition to the Brazilian jungle
A Handful of Dust
by Evelyn Waugh
A country squire loses his marriage and sets out for the Brazilian jungle
Tony Last is a contented but shallow country squire who lives at Hetton Abbey, an English estate. His marriage collapses after his wife Brenda takes a lover, John Beaver, and he joins an expedition to the Brazilian jungle in search of a lost city. Chapman and Hall published it in London on 4 September 1934, after it had been serialized in Harper's Bazaar in summer 1934 with a different ending. The title comes from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
More about this book
Who
Tony Last, Brenda Last, John Beaver, Mr Todd, Dr Messinger and Thérèse de Vitré.
World
Hetton Abbey, an English country estate, and the Brazilian Amazon.
What makes it different
Waugh drew on his own divorce. The jungle episode began as a 1933 short story, "The Man Who Liked Dickens."
Feel
Dry and darkly comic.
Page count and cover shown for: Selected edition
Further reading
- A Handful of DustWikipedia