Spirit of Place

Lose yourself in the definitive collection of glorious travel sketchesby our century's best loved voyager and real-life family member of The Durrells in Corfu.





'Depicts the brio of Durrell's existence with intoxicating vividness.' New York Times

'Much more than just a chronicle of his travels ... Reveals Durrell's honesty, outspokenness, warmth, and extreme sensitivity to people and to the beauty of nature ... Unusual and fascinating.'Library Journal

'Excellent, vigorous, exciting, unselfconscious, with a lively, original vocabulary ... Shot through with strength and vitality.' TLS



From the moment of his birth, Lawrence Durrell was far from home. A British child in India, he was sent to England to receive an education, and by his early twenties had already tired of his native land. With family in tow, he departed for Greece, and spent the rest of his life wandering the world. He traveled not to sight-see but to live, and made homes in Egypt, France, Yugoslavia, and Argentina.



Each time he landed, he rooted himself deep into the native soil, taking in not just the sights and sounds of his new land, but the essential character of the country. In this definitive collection of glorious letters and essays, Durrell exhibits the power of poetic observation that made his travel writing so extraordinary.



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 Anaïs 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.