Available Formats
Justine
By (Author) Lawrence Durrell
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
20th March 2000
FF Classics
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.912
Paperback
224
Width 111mm, Height 178mm, Spine 14mm
143g
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'.
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 1958. 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, 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. Caesar's Vast Ghost, his reflections on the history and culture of Provence, including a late flowering of poems, appeared a few days befo