The Black Book
By (Author) Lawrence Durrell
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
7th June 2012
Main
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.914
256
Width 125mm, Height 195mm, Spine 20mm
210g
First published in Paris in 1938, Durrell's third novel is the story, told from the inside, of the lives and loves of a group of struggling writers and artists in a seedy London hotel.
Controversial at the time because of its sexual frankness, the book was finally published in its complete form only through the efforts of Henry Miller.
Lawrence Durrell was born in 1912 in India. He attended the Jesuit College at Darjeeling and St Edmund's School, Canterbury. His first literary work, The Black Book, appeared in Paris in 1938. His first collection of poems, A Private Country, was published in 1943, followed by the three Island books: Prospero's Cell, Reflections on a Marine Venus, about Rhodes, and Bitter Lemons, his account of life in Cyprus. Durrell's wartime sojourn in Egypt led to his masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet, which he completed in southern France where he settled permanently in 1957. Between the Quartet and The Avignon Quintet he wrote the two-decker Tunc and Nunquam. His oeuvre includes plays, a book of criticism, translations, travel writing, and humorous stories about the diplomatic corps.