You expect there to be affairs, and there are, but the pull of the story to me is more than the scandal, it’s primarily the writing itself. This is a story focusing on the intertwining lives of the unnamed Irish narrator Melissa, his girlfriend Justine, the woman everyone is infatuated with and her husband, Nessim, living in Egypt just before the break of the First World War. I have never read such exquisite descriptions in my life. I just finished one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. A one-sided friendship but you know you’ll be better off for it. Sometimes you discover a new author and know you’re going to be friends for life. Empty cadences of sea-water licking it’s own wounds,sulking along the mouths of the delta, boiling upon those deserted beaches– empty under the gulls: white scribble on the grey, munched by clouds.' - Lawrence Durrell, Justine It’s dim momentum in the mind is the fugue upon which this writing is made. “In the great quietness of these winter evenings there is one clock: the sea. The time Lawrence spent with his family, mother Louisa, siblings Leslie, Margaret Durrell, and Gerald Durrell, on the island of Corfu were the subject of Gerald's memoirs and have been filmed numerous times for TV. Durrell corresponded with author Henry Miller for forty-five years, and Miller influenced much of his early work, including a provocative and controversial novel, The Black Book (1938).

He also penned the celebrated travel memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. A passionate and dedicated writer from an early age, Durrell’s prolific career also included the groundbreaking Avignon Quintet, whose first novel, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and whose third novel, Constance (1982), was nominated for the Booker Prize. Lawrence George Durrell was a critically hailed and beloved novelist, poet, humorist, and travel writer best known for The Alexandria Quartet novels, which were ranked by the Modern Library as among the greatest works of English literature in the twentieth century.

Justine lawrence durrell review