Vile Bodies

Evelyn Waugh's second novel, Vile Bodies, is his tribute to London's smart set. It introduces us to society as it used to be but that now is gone forever, and probably for good.

Improbably, this is a love story in which Adam Fenwick-Symes, a destitute young writer, hungers for Nina Blount, daughter of an eccentric aristocrat. But at the same time, it is a satire that plays against the social whirl of a class doomed to extinction as certainly as the dodo.

"The defiant hilarity of a dance on a sinking ship." --Alexander Woolcott.