Lawrence Durrell

One thousand years from now, a small religious community lives in what were once the fens of eastern England. They are perhaps the world’s last human survivors. Now they find themselves stalked by a force that draws ever closer, and that seems to have brought them to the brink of extinction. A force that offers them a promise and a threat: a place called Alexandria. Set in a time on the far side of an apocalypse, and perhaps on the verge of another, Alexandria is the final novel in my Buckmaster trilogy, which maps two thousand years of human history. Graywolf Press (US), 2020. Faber & Faber (UK), 2021

The fourth and culminating novel in the Alexandria Quartet. Once again past episodes are raked over with a new perspective as the narrator casually begins an affair with the woman of the title, another character from the earlier books.

Roman ciselé et ironique, très apprécié du vieux critique et linguiste Jacques Cellard.

Sebastian was a failure at weaving the traditional spider web until he caught the giant Spider Eater in a practice web.

This collection brings together for the first time over thirty interviews with one of the most fascinating major writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. The interviews demonstrate the range of his concerns over a period of four decades and mark the uniqueness of his voice as an author. The first interview, originally published in the Paris Review, reveals a Durrell launched into fame with the publication in the late 1950s of what continues to be his best-known work, The Alexandria Quartet. With the last interview, Durrell has completed The Avignon Quintet and his career as a novelist. In the thirty years between the appearance of these two conversations, he established his reputation as not only a novelist but also a poet, a writer of travel books, and even a playwright. This collection contains the elements expected of an author's responses to academics and representatives of the media. Durrell speaks of the influences on his early writing, especially what he learned from such radically different mentors as T. S. Eliot and Henry Miller, and of his efforts to free himself from work for the British Foreign Office in the first two decades of his adult life. He answers specific questions about most of his writings and indicates what he reconstructs as his intent in writing them.

Translation from Pope Joan, English translation.

The second instalment of the Alexandria Quartet, begins with the narrator from Justine living on a Greek island with the illegitimate daughter of his former lover, Melissa. The reader soon learns that many of the details from the first novel are unreliable and a very different version of events is gradually untangled.