Clea: Introduced by Elif Shafak

Description

An expat schoolteacher has spent years in exile reflecting on his turmoiled love affair with Justine, a glamorous Egyptian wife. Returning to wartime Alexandria, he finds that his old friends have suffered dramatic changes of body, mind, and fortune - and someone whom he has never really known wishes to see him. His affair with Clea, a bisexual artist, not only changes the lovers, but transforms the dead, forever - and heralds a new beginning, just as Lawrence Durrell's intoxicating masterpiece ends. 'Durrell has written about a dozen real love stories, entwined them, and explored them with a truly Proustian ferocity ... Superb.' - Observer 'Lushly beautiful ... His style glows ... One of the most important works of our time.' - New York Times Book Review 'It is hard now to recapture the impact half a century ago of these novels' heat, luxuriance and profanity

Lawrence Durrell was a British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. Born in 1912 in India to British colonial parents, he was sent to school in England and later moved to Corfu with his family - a period which his brother Gerald fictionalised in My Family and Other Animals - later filmed as The Durrells in Corfu - and which he himself described in Prospero's Cell. The first of Durrell's island books, this was followed by Reflections on a Marine Venus on Rhodes; Bitter Lemons, on Cyprus, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize; and, later, The Greek Islands. Durrell's first major novel, The Black Book, was published in 1938 in Paris, where he befriended Henry Miller and Anais Nin - and it was praised by T. S. Eliot, who published his poetry in 1943. A wartime sojourn in Egypt inspired his bestselling masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea) which he completed in his new home in Southern France, where in 1974 he began The Avignon Quintet. When he died in 1990, Durrell was one of the most celebrated writers in British history. Elif Shafak is an award-winning novelist, public intellectual, and activist, championing causes such as women's rights and freedom of speech. She is the most widely read female writer in Turkey, and her work has been published in 48 languages. Her novels include bestsellers like The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World. Shafak has been longlisted for the Orange Prize, MAN Asian Prize, Baileys Prize, and IMPAC Dublin Award, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and RSL Ondaatje Prize, as well as being awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. She is currently the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor in Comparative European Literature at Oxford.