A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (1934)

Hetton Abbey is hideous, everyone agrees, a Victorian fake-Gothic pile with bedrooms named after Malory's knights, and Tony Last loves it the way other men love a wife or a God. Then Brenda, bored in the country, drifts into an affair with a young man so dull that nobody, least of all Brenda, can say quite why. What follows in _A Handful of Dust_ is the slow, courteous demolition of a life, narrated by Waugh in a tone of such cool amusement that the cruelty sneaks up on you. A child's death, a marriage's collapse, a husband's ruin: each is reported in the same flat register reserved for bad weather at a weekend party, and that level voice is the whole horror. The English comedy of manners walks, smiling, into the South American jungle, and the title's borrowed line from Eliot pays out in full. Fear, it turns out, fits in a handful of dust.