The Alexandria Quartet

"This is something that audio can do so well. At the time that Durrell was writing these four novels between 1957 and 1960, they were all the rage. They came out to great acclaim, and everyone knew them and read them. His work is a little bit obscure now. When you mention Lawrence Durrell to a younger person, it’s not an author they would necessarily read. But here Naxos AudioBooks decided to do a new, unabridged recording of the four novels. They got Nicholas Boulton, a British narrator, who is just brilliant with these novels. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter When we reviewed the first one, Justine , we recognized that Durrell’s descriptive language and the sensual nature of the prose is so vivid and so moving in a way that particularly comes across in audio and in Nicholas Boulton’s performance. So it got an Earphones Award. Then we had the second one reviewed, and a different reviewer gave that book an Earphones Award. All four of them—from four different reviewers all with slightly different takes—were just totally taken by the language and this audio experience of Durrell’s work. They’re set in the 1940s in Alexandria, Egypt, just before and during World War Two . It’s a set of events and characters that are seen from different points of view. It’s the whole idea of being able to see the same thing differently. What’s interesting about the casting here is that Nicholas Boulton became all of those different characters and points of view, instead of having a cast which, maybe, another publisher might have done. He pulls it off brilliantly. Gerald Durrell is one of my absolute favourites. He’s just funnier than anything. In his stories about Corfu, his brother Larry does not come off well at all. I have to say I had a little prejudice about Lawrence Durrell before I saw all the brilliant reviews of the Alexandria Quartet."