Mountolive
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Yellowed
In the labyrinthine world of pre-war Alexandria, where political intrigue and personal betrayal are indistinguishable from one another, Mountolive strips away the romantic veil cast by its predecessors to reveal the cold machinery of diplomacy and conspiracy. David Mountolive, a British ambassador newly posted to Egypt, finds himself ensnared in a web of loyalties — to his country, to his past loves, and to the powerful Hosnani family, whose Coptic nationalist plot threatens to unravel everything he holds dear. As the third volume of Lawrence Durrell's celebrated Alexandria Quartet, this novel boldly reframes the events of Justine and Balthazar through an omniscient, third-person lens, shattering the subjective intimacy of the earlier volumes and replacing it with the stark clarity of geopolitical reality. Durrell's prose achieves a rare equilibrium between lyrical intensity and novelistic precision, presenting Alexandria not merely as a city but as a philosophical condition — a place where identity dissolves and truth is perpetually refracted. Mountolive argues, with quiet force, that power corrupts not through violence but through the slow erosion of personal honour, and that love, however sincere, is no armour against the demands of the state. The novel stands as a masterwork of 20th-century British modernism, and rewards its reader with the unsettling question: in a world of competing allegiances, is it ever truly possible to act with integrity?
Author: Lawrence Durrell
Format: Hardback
Published: 1958, Faber and Faber
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Yellowed
In the labyrinthine world of pre-war Alexandria, where political intrigue and personal betrayal are indistinguishable from one another, Mountolive strips away the romantic veil cast by its predecessors to reveal the cold machinery of diplomacy and conspiracy. David Mountolive, a British ambassador newly posted to Egypt, finds himself ensnared in a web of loyalties — to his country, to his past loves, and to the powerful Hosnani family, whose Coptic nationalist plot threatens to unravel everything he holds dear. As the third volume of Lawrence Durrell's celebrated Alexandria Quartet, this novel boldly reframes the events of Justine and Balthazar through an omniscient, third-person lens, shattering the subjective intimacy of the earlier volumes and replacing it with the stark clarity of geopolitical reality. Durrell's prose achieves a rare equilibrium between lyrical intensity and novelistic precision, presenting Alexandria not merely as a city but as a philosophical condition — a place where identity dissolves and truth is perpetually refracted. Mountolive argues, with quiet force, that power corrupts not through violence but through the slow erosion of personal honour, and that love, however sincere, is no armour against the demands of the state. The novel stands as a masterwork of 20th-century British modernism, and rewards its reader with the unsettling question: in a world of competing allegiances, is it ever truly possible to act with integrity?