Lawrence Durrell

The final installment of the Alexandria Quartet. Years after his liaisons with Justine and Melissa, Darley becomes immersed in a relationship with Clea, a bisexual artist. The ensuing chain of events transforms not only the lovers, but the dead as well, and leads to the series' brilliant and unexpected resolution.   Praised by Life as among the 'most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time,' Clea carries on Durrell's assured and...

The acclaimed first novel of the Alexandria Quartet, and the celebrated story of an all-consuming love transcending time and place. Set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the years between World Wars I and II, Justine is the first installment in the distinguished Alexandria Quartet. Here Lawrence Durrell crafts an exquisite and challenging modern novel that explores tragic love and the fluidity of recollection. Employing a fluctuating narrative and poetic prose,...

The definitive collection of travel writings by one of the twentieth century's best-loved journeyers. From the moment of his birth, Lawrence Durrell was far from home. A British child in India, he was sent to England to receive an education, and by his early twenties had already tired of his native land. With family in tow, he departed for Greece, and spent the rest of his life wandering the world. He traveled not to sightsee but to live, and made...

For the British delegation to Vulgaria, no problem is too small to become a crisis in this lively story collection of diplomatic misadventure In the words of Antrobus, master diplomat in the King's service, diplomacy was once 'a quiet and restful trade carried on in soothing inanity among a hundred shady legations and embassies all over the globe.' What changed? What caused this most noble profession to fall from grace? Women, of course. A diplomatic...

The complete Avignon Quintet.  Published between 1974 and1985, the five books that make up the Avignon Quintet are another monumental achievement by one of the most inventive and acclaimed novelists of the twentieth century. Beginning in the years leading up to the Second World War and ending in the years just after it, the characters of Durrell's timeless series travel from France to Egypt to England to Switzerland, encountering irrepressible political...

A British secret agent on a dangerous mission to solve a fellow spy's murder. After some especially taxing missions, seasoned secret agent Methuen wants nothing more than to take a long, relaxing fishing trip. But after a fellow British spy is killed in the remote mountains of Serbia, Methuen is called back into action. What follows is a suspenseful tale of espionage told with Lawrence Durrell's characteristic panache. Methuen sets up camp in the...

A pair of lectures from one of the twentieth century's most mesmerizing speakers. Lawrence Durrell was in his early twenties when, tired of the stiffness of London life, he took his family to live in Corfu. Interwar Greece, whose hard beds and mosquito swarms Durrell documented so tenderly in Prospero's Cell, was no more. In the first of this pair of lectures, given during a 1970s visit to California, Durrell recalls those days, talking of family,...

Who will survive the Labyrinth of Crete? A group of English cruise-ship tourists debark to visit the isle of Crete's famed labyrinth, the City in the Rock. The motley gathering includes a painter, a poet, a soldier, an elderly married couple, a medium, a convalescent girl, and the mysterious Lord Gracean. The group is prepared for a trifling day of sightseeing and maybe even a glimpse of the legendary Minotaur, but instead is suddenly stuck in a nightmare...

Eleven charming, delicate sketches of diplomatic life in service of the crown. After decades spent representing Britain around the globe, Antrobus has earned a shirtful of medals and the right to pass afternoons in his London club, musing over old times. His memory is long, and every old embarrassment still rankles, no matter how ridiculous. The incident with the Yugoslav ghost train, for instance, still causes him to clench his fists in fear. When...

At the dawn of World War II, Livia and her sister Constance commit themselves to separate sides of a historic struggle in the second volume of the Avignon Quintet.   The second book of Durrell's inventive and inspiring Avignon Quintet, Livia follows the currents of longing and regret, and the shifting illusions of memory, that began in Monsieur. Two sisters, Livia and Constance, have already led remarkable lives as scholars, lovers of artists, and...