An English country gentleman named Tony Last loves his Gothic estate, his comfortable routines, and his faithless wife, and the novel watches each of these attachments destroyed with a precision that is at once comic and devastating. Published in 1934, it traces the collapse of a marriage and, through it, the collapse of an entire class that still believed in duty, honour, and the permanence of beautiful old houses. Brenda Last's affair proceeds with the casual cruelty of someone rearranging furniture, and Tony's bewildered decency becomes its own kind of doom. The ending, in which the last gentleman finds himself trapped in the Brazilian jungle reading Dickens aloud forever, is among the most savagely perfect conclusions in English fiction