Justine (Alexandria Quartet)

by Lawrence Durrell (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1991

  $8.69

  The time is the eve of the Second World War. The place is Alexandria, an Egyptian city that once housed the world's greatest library and whose inhabitants are still dedicated to knowledge. But for the obsessed and purblind characters in this mesmerizing first novel of the Alexandria Quartet, the pursuit of knowledge leads to no library, only to the 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. It is not so much a book as it is a self-contained universe, constructed by one of the most elegant and formidably intelligent minds in contemporary fiction.

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $3.45

  'I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.' The tragic story of the mysterious and fascinating Justine, and those whose lives she touched in pre-war Alexandria, is told by her lover, an impoverished Irish teacher who has sought refuge across the Mediterranean in Greece. It is undoubtedly a love-story, but the real heroine of the book is its setting: Alexandria, the city 'which decrees that its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain'.