The Alexandria Quartet. Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea.

DURRELL, Lawrence.

Item Number: 97452

New York: E.P. Dutton and Company Inc, 1962.

Signed limited first edition of Durrell’s masterpiece, one of 199 numbered copies, this is number 70. Signed by Lawrence Durrell on the limitation page. Octavo, original half cloth, over marbled boards, top edge gilt. In fine condition.

Lawrence Durrell's masterpiece The Alexandria Quartet are four novels set in Alexandria, Egypt during the 1940s. The first of his four novels Justine "demands comparison with the best books of our century." Balthazar continues Durrell’s epic series with "a spontaneous, resourceful new beauty" and, in the third novel Mountolive, Durrell again creates a "work of splendid craft and troubling veracity." The tetralogy’s final novel Clea completes Durrell’s stated design of modeling "the series on ‘the relativity proposition’ in physics"—altogether achieving "a spontaneous, resourceful new beauty" (New York Times).