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The Alexandria Quartet Series

This quartet masterfully weaves intricate relationships, love, and loss within the exotic backdrop of Alexandria before and during World War II. Each volume offers a distinct perspective on its central characters, revealing the depths of their desires and conflicts. The narratives delve into the nature of memory, illusion, and reality, blurring the lines between fiction and truth.

The Alexandria Quartet
Clea
Mountolive
Balthazar
Justine

Recommended Reading Order

  1. 1

    Justine

    3.8(97)Add rating

    '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'.

    Justine
  2. 2

    Balthazar

    • 224 pages
    • 8 hours of reading
    4.1(21)Add rating

    During sessions with his psychiatrist, Balthazar, their intricate love affair is cast in a radical, sinister light, illuminating a mysterious plot connected to a recent murder - but Lawrence Durrell's dazzling, kaleidoscopic storytelling means that nothing is ever as it seems ...

    Balthazar
  3. 3

    Mountolive

    4.0(56)Add rating

    Mountolive is a novel of vertiginous disclosures, in which the betrayer and the betrayed share secret alliances and an adulterous marriage turns out to be a vehicle for the explosive passions of the modern Middle East.

    Mountolive
  4. 4

    Clea

    4.2(2508)Add rating

    The magnificent final volume of one of the most widely acclaimed fictional masterpieces of the postwar era. Few books have been awaited as eagerly as Clea, the sensuous and electrically suspenseful novel that resolves the enigmas of the Alexandria Quartet. Some years and one world war was after his bizarre liaisons with Melissa and Justine, the Irish émigré Darley becomes enmeshed with the bisexual artist Clea. That affair not only changes the lovers, it transforms the dead as well, revealing new layers of duplicity and desire, perversity and pathos in Lawrence Durrell’s masterly construction. “A massive, marvelously concrete, deeply felt statement of faith. . . . His style glows with the mineral deposits of many cultures. One of the most important works of our time has come to an end.”—The New York Times Book Review “Clea rounds out the tetralogy with grace, beauty, and stunning impact. . . . This rich, exciting fare is Durrell’s finest writing style, a manner of writing few living authors can equal. . . . A magnificent achievement.”—The Detriot News “The reader is carried along on a current of superbly accomplished prose, as flexible and colorful as that of any contemporary writer. . . . What Durrell has given us is well worth having.”—San Francisco Chronicle

    Clea