Balthazar

The dazzling second volume of The Alexandria Quartet - and enthralling and deeply disturbing work of gorgeous surfaces and endless deceptions.

In Alexandria in the years before the Second World War, an exiled Irish school teacher seeks to unravel his sexual obsession with two women: the tubercular cafe dancer, Melissa, and Justine, the alluring Jewish wife of a wealthy Coptic Christian. What emerges in his sessions with the psychiatrist Balthazar, however, is something far more complex - and unfathomably more sinister - than neurosis. Lawrence Durrell's kaleidoscopic narrative ushers us into a world in which no perception is reliable - and love itself is always an act of treachery.