A collection of travel essays from the New York Times –bestselling author whose writing sparkles with "prose as luminous as the Mediterranean air he loves" ( Time ).Few men have traveled as wisely as Lawrence Durrell. Born in India, he lived in Corfu as a young man, enjoying salt air, cobalt water, and an unfettered bohemian lifestyle. Over the following decades, he rambled aroun...

The New York Times –bestselling author of the Alexandria Quartet offers a collection of comic tales about the British Empire's colonial diplomats.As the overseer of the kitchen at the British embassy in Vulgaria, De Mandeville has begun to abuse his power. He subjects the King's guests to a blistering Madras curry, a French onion soup served without spoons, and a table so loaded with vegetation that the party can hardly s...

Travel writing "as luminous as the Mediterranean air" from the New York Times –bestselling author of the Alexandria Quartet ( Time ).Born in India, acclaimed British novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell lived in Corfu as a young man, enjoying salt air, cobalt water, and an unfettered bohemian lifestyle, along with his brother, Gerald, who would also go on to be a writer and a natur...

From France to Egypt, a man and his lovers are invented and reinvented in the first Avignon Quintet novel from the New York Times –bestselling author.For British doctor Bruce Drexel, a return to Provence is bittersweet. Here, at a rustic chateau, he once fell in love with Sylvie, the Frenchwoman who would become his wife, and befriended her brother, Piers. The three made up a peculiar, potent ménage for years until Sylvie...

A moving account of friendship and discovery on the island of Sicily by the New York Times –bestselling travel writer and author of the Alexandria Quartet.Despite decades spent writing poetic evocations of the timeless pleasures of life in the Mediterranean, Lawrence Durrell had never set foot on the sea's largest island: mysterious, impenetrable Sicily. For years his friend Martine begged him to visit her on this sun-kis...

Excerpt Let us take a novelist-in-the-cupboard peep at Tarquin. He has already managed to crawl out of his tepid bed and lift the window sash. The sight of the snow disgusts him. By instinct he hops back and draws the covers up to his chin, trying to hurl himself back into dream with skinny ferocity. No good. Then he remembers the dream he was having and broods pleasantly upon it. A girl on a riverbank. Or boy? It would be better as a boy on a verdant bank, a Cretan saffron gatherer now, t...

The definitive collection of travel writings by the New York Times –bestselling author and 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 wan...

For the Brits in Vulgaria, diplomatic misadventure is the order of the day in this lively story collection from the New York Times –bestselling author.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...

The New York Times –bestselling author's four-part story of passion and betrayal—voted one of the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the twentieth century.The Alexandria Quartet is a striking and sensuous masterpiece, breathing vivid life into each of its unforgettable characters and the dusty Mediterranean city in which they live. Set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the years before, during, and after World War II, the books f...

The New York Times –bestselling author's "very remarkable" first Alexandria novel tells a haunting story of love, desire, and deception in pre-WWII Egypt ( New York Herald Tribune Book Review ).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 exqui...

A breathtaking novel of passion and politics, set in the hotbed of Palestine in the 1940s, by a master of twentieth-century fictionIt is the eve of Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine in 1948, a moment that will mark the beginning of a new Israel. But the course of history is uncertain, and Israel’s territorial enemies plan to smother the new country at its birth. Judith Roth has escaped the concentration camps in Germany only to be plunged into the new conflict, o...

An idealistic inventor is seduced by a mysterious firm in this Faustian novel by the "virtuoso" New York Times –bestselling author of the Alexandria Quartet ( The New York Times ).Felix Charlock's scientific genius is unrivaled—and so is his very special invention. So special, in fact, that a shadowy and enigmatic international firm, called Merlin, recruits Felix and marries him ...