The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell

In 1938 T. S. Eliot praised The Black Book as being "the first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction." This title is indispensable to a full understanding of the Alexandrian Quartet's mastermind. Written at a time when still a young iconoclast, inebriated with sex, sin, youth and the vagaries of transgression, we find in this strange impassioned frenzied look into the indiscretions of the 30s a vulgar voice that shares a pristine magnificence of prose as we were to later become enchanted by in the Quartet.