Balthazar

Lose yourself in the thrilling political intrigue and tangled love affairs of wartime Egypt, in Durrell's epic modern classic. Every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position ... As the threat of war looms over Alexandria, an exiled Anglo-Irish schoolteacher unravels his erotic obsession with two women: Melissa, a dancer, and Justine, a glamorous Egyptian wife. During sessions with his psychiatrist, Balthazar, their intricate love affair is cast in a radical, sinister new light, illuminating a mysterious plot connected to a recent murder - but Lawrence Durrell's kaleidoscopic storytelling means that nothing is ever as it seems ... 'Legendary ... Casts a spell ... A fine storyteller. Reader, watch out!' Jan Morris, Guardian 'A brave and brazen work ... Lush and grandiose.'Independent 'One of the very best novelists of our time ... [such] beauty.' New York Times Book Review VOLUME TWO OF LAWRENCE DURRELL'S ALEXANDRIA QUARTET

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- later filmed as The Durrells in Corfu - 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 Anaïs 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.