Sicilian Carousel

Having immersed himself in the islands of Rhodes, Corfu and Cyprus, Lawrence Durrell turns to Sicily, the largest of the Mediterranean islands, with its long and varied history and its spectacular archaeological remains. To equip himself for this formidable task, Durrell joined a tour, the 'Sicilian Carousel', and the account of his travels with a mixed bag of companions is characteristically sharp and witty. But the deeper theme is Mediterranean civilization, its manifestations and its meaning, not only in Sicily but in Greece, in Italy, in Southern France. The book includes several poems by Durrell, not previously published, all inspired by different parts of the island and is illustrated by a selection of elegant engravings. Sicilian Carousel is a book to treasure.

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 ITV's 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.