Walking slowly home through the dark avenue of trees, tasting the brackish harbour wind, I remembered Justine saying harshly as she lay in bed: 'We use each other like axes to cut down the ones we really love'.
Alexandria: the great winepress of love. Trams, palm trees, and watermelon stalls lie honey-bathed in sunlight; in darkened bedrooms, sweaty lovers unfurl. But in a world trembling on the brink of war, passion and death are inextricable. When a penniless Anglo-Irish schoolteacher begins an affair with Justine - a married Egyptian lady of unparalleled glamour - their partners, Melissa and Nessim, are sucked into a whirlpool of jealousy and violence.
One of the twentieth century's greatest romances, rich in political and sexual intrigue, Lawrence Durrell's scandalous 'investigation of modern love' set the world alight in 1957, and - as Andre Aciman reveals - it seduces readers to this day.
'A masterpiece.' - Guardian
'One of the great works of English fiction.' - Times
'Triumphant [in its] beauty, cruelty, menace, mystery, decadence... ' - Spectator
Author Biography:
Lawrence Durrell was a British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. Born in 1912 in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to school in England and later moved to Corfu with his family - a period which his brother Gerald fictionalised in My Family and Other Animals, and which he himself described in Prospero's Cell. The first of Durrell's island books, this was followed by Reflections on a Marine Venus on Rhodes; Bitter Lemons, on Cyprus, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize; and, later, The Greek Islands.
Durrell's first major novel, The Black Book, was published in 1938 in Paris, where he befriended Henry Miller and Anais Nin - and it was praised by T. S. Eliot, who published his poetry in 1943. A wartime sojourn in Egypt inspired his bestselling masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea) which he completed in his new home in Southern France, where in 1974 he began The Avignon Quintet. When he died in 1990, Durrell was one of the most celebrated writers in British history.
Andre Aciman is the bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name, Out of Egypt, Eight White Nights, False Papers, Alibis, Harvard Square, Enigma Variations, and, most recently, Find Me.
