Justine

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 it seduces readers to this day.

Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Lawrence Durrell was a critically hailed and beloved novelist, poet, humorist, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet novels, which were ranked by the Modern Library as among the greatest works of English literature in the twentieth century. A passionate and dedicated writer from an early age, Durrell’s prolific career also included the groundbreaking Avignon Quintet, whose first novel, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and whose third novel, Constance (1982), was nominated for the Booker Prize. He also penned the celebrated travel memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. Durrell corresponded with author Henry Miller for forty-five years, and Miller influenced much of his early work, including a provocative and controversial novel, The Black Book (1938). Durrell died in France in 1990.