Recommendations
Books Like A Handful of Dust
English social satire and the cost of loyalty to a vanishing world
If A Handful of Dust caught you — Waugh's cold eye, Tony's devotion to Hetton, the savage Amazonian ending, the comedy that keeps darkening — these eight novels share its satirical mode, its portrait of English society between the wars, or its sense that civilization is thinner than it appears.
- 1Buy
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
Charles Ryder's memories of his friendship with Sebastian Flyte and his love for Julia, and the Marchmain family's relationship to their Catholicism and their great house — Waugh's most ambitious and most widely read novel; a companion to A Handful of Dust in its preoccupation with great English houses and their passing, though more elegiac than satirical in tone and more directly engaged with religious faith
- 2Buy
Decline and Fall
by Evelyn Waugh
Paul Pennyfeather sent down from Oxford for something he did not do — Waugh's debut novel; purer farce than A Handful of Dust, without its touch of genuine sadness; the best starting point for readers who want Waugh's comedy unmixed with the Amazon's melancholy, and the novel that shows where his satirical method began
- 3Buy
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark
An unconventional Edinburgh schoolteacher whose enthusiasms for Renaissance art and Mussolini shape the lives of her chosen girls — Spark is the closest heir to Waugh's satirical method in mid-century British fiction: the same cold precision, the same willingness to be funny about catastrophe, and the same sense that social comedy is covering something genuinely sinister; where Waugh's targets are male English social institutions, Spark's are female Scottish ones
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Scoop
by Evelyn Waugh
William Boot, a nature columnist, accidentally sent as a war correspondent to a fictional African country — Waugh's 1938 novel is the most directly comparable to A Handful of Dust in its comedy of a decent, bewildered man ground up by systems he cannot understand; where Tony Last is destroyed by English social manners, William Boot is destroyed by Fleet Street and colonial politics
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens the butler's drive across England and his recognition of what he sacrificed for his loyalty to Darlington Hall — Ishiguro's novel is the quiet companion to A Handful of Dust: both are about an Englishman whose devotion to a particular English ideal (a house, a butler's professionalism) leads him to destroy everything else; where Tony's destruction is grotesque comedy, Stevens's is understated tragedy
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Good Behaviour
by Molly Keane
Aroon St. Charles, the unloved daughter of an Anglo-Irish big house, narrating the story of her family's decline with complete unawareness of her own role in it — Keane's 1981 novel is the Irish counterpart to A Handful of Dust: the same dying world of great houses and rigid social codes, the same comedy that conceals genuine horror, and the same unreliable narrator who cannot see what the reader can
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The Pursuit of Love
by Nancy Mitford
Linda Radlett and her cousin Fanny growing up in an eccentric English upper-class family between the wars — Mitford's comedy of manners shares A Handful of Dust's interwar setting, its affectionate demolition of the English upper class, and its portrait of people who are simultaneously absurd and sympathetic; where Waugh's comedy is cold and destructive, Mitford's is warm and forgiving
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Cold Comfort Farm
by Stella Gibbons
Flora Poste, a sensible young woman, descending on her eccentric rural cousins and rationalizing their gothic squalor — Gibbons's 1932 comic novel is the contemporary counterpart to A Handful of Dust: both parody English literary traditions about the countryside, both deploy a comic heroine of perfect social composure, and both are essentially about what happens when the modern world collides with a Britain that refuses to update itself
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