Charles Ryder, a colorless young man, meets an absurdly fey, charming aristocrat at Oxford named Sebastian Flyte, who explains to him the importance of beauty, good wine, amusing banter and fresh plover's eggs. Ryder swoons into a dream of love — of both the heterosexual and, more subtly, homosexual varieties — that lasts decades, but the gilded country-house world of the Flyte family contains the seeds of its own destruction.