It is wartime, and the infantry battalion of which Captain Charles Ryder is a company commander, is transferred from a site near Glasgow to a location further south. Traveling in a troop train, Ryder and his fellow officers wonder where they are going—overseas? Ryder thinks not. His Army career has been full of such abortive rumors, as well as boredom and the stupidity of superiors. Approaching middle-age, wifeless, childless, a peacetime painter cut off from his art, he has lost all his illusions.
The battalion arrives and with a surge of complex emotions, Ryder finds himself in a known and once-loved place-the grounds of Brideshead Castle, a sumptuous, baroque masterpiece which was once a second home, and nearly a first. It belonged to the aristocratic Flyte family—Lord Marchmain, his eider son, Lord Brideshead, his younger children, Lord Sebastian Flyte, Lady Julia Flyte and Lady Cordelia Flyte. Ryder tells us the story of the family and his painful and joyous connection.
Based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh