Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books. He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century. Evelyn Waugh’s most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust, the novel Brideshead Revisited, and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour. Waugh’s novels, although their material is nearly always derived from firsthand experience, are unusually highly wrought and precisely written. The action of Brideshead Revisited describes providence, grace, and the redemption through suffering of a jaded, often hilarious modernism. Evelyn Waugh explores these themes in the memory of his fictional narrator, Charles Ryder. In the prologue, Ryder prepares to move from the military camp where he has been stationed for several months. At the age of thirty-nine, he reflects that he has begun to feel old, and his love for the army has died. Waugh wrote that the novel "deals with what is theologically termed 'the operation of Grace', that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself". In 2003, the novel was listed at number 45 on the BBC survey The Big Read. In 2005, it was chosen by Time magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. In 2009, Newsweek magazine listed it as one of the 100 best books of world literature. Enjoy free online English audiobook “Brideshead Revisited”, a breathtaking novel by Evelyn Waugh.
