<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br>The dazzling second volume of <i>The Alexandria Quartet</i>--an enthralling and deeply disturbing work of gorgeous surfaces and endless deceptions. <p/> In Alexandra, in the years before the Second World War, an exiled Irish schoolteacher seeks to unravel his sexual obsession with two women: the tubercular café dancer, Melissa, and Justine, the alluring Jewish wife of a wealthy Coptic Christian. What emerges in his sessions with the psychiatrist Balthazar, however, is something far more complex--and unfathomably more sinister--than neurosis. Lawrence Durrell's kaleidoscopic narrative ushers us into a world in which no perception is reliable--and love itself is always an act of treachery. <p/> "Durrell is one of the very best novelists of our time. . . . He has a sensuous, vigorous style that I have not found equaled by any other novelist today. . . . A spontaneous, resourceful new beauty that any sensitive reader will almost certainly love."--<i>The New York Book Review<br></i><br> "It is difficult to sum up <i>Balthazar</i>; it will not be contained. It spills or slips away like smoke. The sheer writing is superb. . . . A wonderful book, a book to read many times."--<i>The Houston Post</i><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><b>Lawrence Durrell </b>was born in 1912 in India. He attended the Jesuit College at Darjeeling and St. Edmund's School, Canterbury. His first literary work, <i>The Black Book</i>, appeared in Paris in 1938. His first collection of poems, <i>A Private Country</i>, was published in 1943, followed by the three Island books: <i>Prospero's Cell</i>; <i>Reflections on a Marine Venus</i>, about Rhodes; and <i>Bitter Lemons</i>, his account of life in Cyprus. Durrell's wartime sojourn in Egypt led to his masterpiece, <i>The Alexandria Quartet</i>, which he completed in southern France, where he settled permanently in 1957. Between the quartet and <i>The Avignon Quintet</i> he wrote the two-decker <i>Tunc </i>and <i>Nunquam</i>. His oeuvre includes plays, a book of criticism, translations, travel writing, and humorous stories about the diplomatic corps. <i>Caesar's Vast Ghost</i>, his reflections on the history and culture of Provence, including a late flowering of poems, was published a few days before his death in Sommières in 1990.
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