Stock up with our Shop Small Sale! Shop the sale
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Collage of audiobooks

Shop Small Sale

Shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks. Don’t miss out—purchases support local bookstores.

Shop the sale
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

The Loved One

$19.94

Get for $14.99 with membership
Narrator Simon Prebble

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 3 hours 23 minutes
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

"A work of art as rich and subtle and unnerving as anything its author has ever done" (New Yorker), The Loved One is Evelyn Waugh's cutting satire of 1940s California and the Anglo-American cultural divide.

Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday--and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer's art. Waugh's dark and savage satire depicts a world where reputation, love, and death cost a very great deal.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), whom Time called "one of the century's great masters of English prose," wrote several widely acclaimed novels as well as volumes of biography, memoir, travel writing, and journalism. Three of his novels, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, and Brideshead Revisited, were selected by the Modern Library as among the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.

Collage of audiobooks

Shop Small Sale

Shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks. Don’t miss out—purchases support local bookstores.

Shop the sale
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Reviews

"Fiendishly entertaining."—New York Times "As a piece of writing it is nearly faultless; as satire it is an act of devastation."—John Woodburn, The New Republic "You'd better buy The Loved One, because I can't imagine a purchase apt to corrupt and delight you more...Never before that I can remember has a talent of such austere and classic design been applie to such monstrous vulgarities; never before have the majestic themes of love and death been so delicately perverted to absurdity....It is certainly a work of art, as rich and subtle and unnerving as anything its author has ever done."—Wolcott Gibbs, The New Yorker "Although the locale of The Loved One is Hollywood, it is not filmdom that Mr. Waugh takes in hand, but the American ethos....He finds a touchstone for the mass-mind of America, for the compulsion to 'package' everything, even love and death....Mr. Waugh's treatment of his macabre material is uninhibited, and wickedly funny...as sadistic, playful, and decisive as a cat's paw on a mouse."—Alice S. Morris, New York Times Book Review Expand reviews
Stock up with our Shop Small Sale! Shop the sale