Alexandria Quartet Books

The time is the eve of the World War II. The place is Alexandria, an Egyptian city that once housed the world's greatest library and whose inhabitants are dedicated to knowledge. But for the obsessed characters in this mesmerizing novel, their pursuits lead only to bedrooms in which each seeks to know—and possess—the other. Since its publication in 1957, Justine has inspired an almost religious devotion among readers and critics alike.

The intrigues of Justine and Balthazar multiply and deepen in the third volume of the Alexandria Quartet, giving us a novel of labyrinthine intricacy and mesmerizing beauty. In the first two novels of this profoundly innovative masterpiece, Lawrence Durrell explored two sides of a romantic quadrangle involving several inhabitants of prewar Alexandria. Now that geometry is seen from a startling new angle—through the clinical eye of a British diplomat, for whom love is only another form of statecraft. Like its predecessors, Mountolive is a novel of vertiginous disclosures, in which the betrayer and the betrayed share secret alliances and an adulterous marriage turns out to be a vehicle for the explosive passions of the modern Middle East. “Durrell is almost without peer in conveying atmosphere and mood. Even if his Alexandria never existed on this earth, it is now as real as Hawthorne’s Rome, Proust’s Paris, Loti’s Constantinople. . . . Mountolive is dazzlingly cohesive, beautifully controlled from beginning to end.”— Saturday Review “A work of splendid craft and troubling veracity.”— The New York Times “ Mountolive has vivid imagery and scenes of ghastly hilarity. . . . Readers will be sharply aware that they are encountering an acute intelligence pursuing a grand design.”— TIME

The magnificent final volume of one of the most widely acclaimed fictional masterpieces of the postwar era. Few books have been awaited as eagerly as Clea , the sensuous and electrically suspenseful novel that resolves the enigmas of the Alexandria Quartet. Some years and one world war was after his bizarre liaisons with Melissa and Justine, the Irish émigré Darley becomes enmeshed with the bisexual artist Clea. That affair not only changes the lovers, it transforms the dead as well, revealing new layers of duplicity and desire, perversity and pathos in Lawrence Durrell’s masterly construction. “A massive, marvelously concrete, deeply felt statement of faith. . . . His style glows with the mineral deposits of many cultures. One of the most important works of our time has come to an end.”— The New York Times Book Review “ Clea rounds out the tetralogy with grace, beauty, and stunning impact. . . . This rich, exciting fare is Durrell’s finest writing style, a manner of writing few living authors can equal. . . . A magnificent achievement.”— The Detriot News “The reader is carried along on a current of superbly accomplished prose, as flexible and colorful as that of any contemporary writer. . . . What Durrell has given us is well worth having.”— San Francisco Chronicle