New This Month

Nicholas Boulton brings us Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, Lawrence Durrell’s atmospheric and poetic tetralogy of novels, together known as The Alexandria Quartet. Set in the sensuous, hot environment of Alexandria around the Second World War, it is known for its hypnotic and vivid prose, and its compelling take on modern love. It is undoubtedly one of the greatest works of the 20th century.

We also have Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins and My Childhood by Maxim Gorky, two more captivating recordings by Nicholas Boulton, as well as Colonel Chabert, Balzac’s gripping novella about a soldier’s attempts to restore his identity after being presumed dead, read by the inimitable Bill Homewood.

Justine is the first volume in The Alexandria Quartet, four interlinked novels set in the sensuous, hot environment of Alexandria just before the Second World War. Within this polyglot setting…

‘The politics of love, the intrigues of desire, good and evil, virtue and caprice, love and murder, moved obscurely in the dark corners of Alexandria’s streets and squares, brothels and drawing-rooms…’

‘Mountolive who had already found the open sesame of language ready to hand, suddenly began to feel himself really penetrating a foreign country…’ In Mountolive, the third volume in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet…

‘I knew that Clea would share everything with me, withholding nothing – not even the look of complicity which women reserve only for their mirrors.’ In Clea, the concluding part of…

Published 10 years after Collins’s most popular novel The Woman in White, Man and Wife centres on the confused and inequitable marriage laws of 19th-century Britain, reflecting the author’s own antipathy towards the institution.

Published in 1913, My Childhood is the first in an autobiographical trilogy by the Russian writer and five-time Nobel Prize-nominee Maxim Gorky. Painfully moving in places, the book tells of the experiences of a young boy…

In the brutal Prussian winter of 1807, Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée suffered massive losses to the Russians in the Battle of Eylau. Many thousands died. Young Colonel Chabert falls heroically…

The NAB Blog: Lawrence Durrell: Different Perspectives in Alexandria

Recent releases from Naxos have included Nicholas Boulton’s splendid performance of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet. The four books were commercially and critically celebrated on their release (between 1957 and 1960) and collectively remain the author’s most well-known work. The …

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