Bitter Lemons of Cyprus

Lose yourself in this classic prize-winning memoir of life in 1950s Cyprus on the brink of revolution by the legendary king of travel writing and real-life family member of The Durrells in Corfu.

'Stunning.' André Aciman

'Masterly ... Casts a spell.' Jan Morris

'Invades the reader's every sense ... Remarkable.' Victoria Hislop

'These days I am admiring and re-admiring Lawrence Durrell.' Elif Shafak

'Our last great garlicky master of the vanishing Mediterranean.' Richard Holmes

'Exceptional ... Revelatory ... A master.' Observer

'He writes as an artist, as well as a poet . Profoundly beautiful.' New Statesman

Cyprus, 1953. As the island fights for independence from British colonial rule, ancient conflicts between Turkish and Greek Cypriots trouble the glittering Mediterranean waters. Into the brewing political storm enters Lawrence Durrell, yearning for the idyllic island lifestyle of his youth in Corfu.

He settles into a dilapidated villa, and with his poet's eye for beauty - and passable Greek - vividly captures the moods and atmospheres of island life in a changing world. Whether collecting folklore or wild flowers, describing the brewing revolution or eccentric local characters, Durrell is a magician with words: and the result is not only a classic travel memoir, but an intimate portrait of a community lost forever.

WINNER OF THE DUFF COOPER MEMORIAL PRIZE

'Brilliant ... Never for a moment does Durrell lose the poet's touch.' New York Times

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.