Lawrence Durrell's series of four novels set in Alexandria, Egypt during the 1940s. The lush and sensuous series consists of:
Justine(1957)
Balthazar(1958)
Mountolive(1958)
Clea(1960)
Justine, Balthazar and Mountolive use varied viewpoints to relate a series of events in Alexandria before World War II. In Clea, the story continues into the years during the war.
One L.G. Darley is the primary observer of the events, which include events in the lives of those he loves and those he knows. In Justine, Darley attempts to recover from and put into perspective his recently ended affair with a woman. Balthazar reinterprets the romantic perspective he placed on the affair and its aftermath in Justine, in more philosophical and intellectual terms.
Mountolive tells a story minus interpretation, and Clea reveals Darley's healing, and coming to love another woman.

《亚历山大四重奏》中的四部小说:《贾斯汀》、《巴萨泽》、《芒特奥利夫》和《克丽》

A critical and commercial success, the books present four perspectives on a single set of events and characters in Alexandria, Egypt, before and during World War II.
As Durrell explains in his preface to Balthazar, the four novels are an exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject-object relation, with modern love as the subject. The Quartet offers the same sequence of events to us through several points of view, allowing individual perspectives to change over time.
The four novels are:
Justine (1957)
Balthazar (1958)
Mountolive (1958)
Clea (1960)
In a 1959 Paris Review interview, Durrell described the ideas behind the Quartet in terms of a convergence of Eastern and Western metaphysics, based on Einstein's overturning of the old view of the material universe, and Freud's doing the same for the concept of stable personalities, yielding a new concept of reality. For all the novels' experiments with chronology and viewpoint, for many readers the appeal lies in the luxurious beauty of the writing; it is difficult to find writing that so prodigiously and intricately recreates atmosphere, place and fleeting emotion with such style.

儘管賽普勒斯經常成為旅行者的目的地，但島上希臘和土耳其社群之間長期戰爭的源起並未同等出名。在《賽普勒斯的酸檸檬》中，勞倫斯．杜雷爾揉合了他在這個美麗島嶼上的新生活以及衝突，開始了他的故事。
一開始，情況有如彼得．梅爾的《山居歲月》，是「到國外好好生活」；杜雷爾為賽普勒斯島陽光洋溢的景致、地中海絢爛且生氣盎然的蔚藍天空感到心曠神怡。然而，環境和杜雷爾的詩歌天才，使得這部作品比歡鬧事件和或古怪或善辯的鄰居的編年史還更富趣味。他津津有味地寫出左鄰右舍的趣事及瑣事，但也逐漸帶入賽普勒斯的自決戰爭悲劇。
「意諾西斯」運動鼓吹賽普勒斯人脫離英國託管狀態，但也點燃了背叛的火炬，也一舉粉碎了杜雷爾平靜的村居生活，他在賽普勒斯上的生活不再快活，反而帶來憂心與悲傷。當他描述政治情勢轉換和似是而非的論點時，透露出抑制的憤怒；而在他對當地景物與人們如詩般的描述中，不自覺地常流露出他的同理心與愛意。《賽普勒斯的酸檸檬》不僅是杜雷爾的鄉居回憶，也為一九五三至五六年的賽普勒斯島留下真切的歷史紀錄。

In the final volume of the "Alexandrian Quartet", Darley returns to Alexandria now caught by war-fever. The conflagration has its effect on his circle - on Nessim and Justine, Balthazar and Clea, Mountolive and Pombal. The story is supplemented by music from Debussy, Ravel, Britten and Piazzola.

Set amid the corrupt glamour and multiplying intrigues of Alexandria in the 1930s and 1940s, the novels of Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet" (of which this is the first) follow the shifting alliances - sexual, cultural and political - of a group of quite varied characters.

In his hugely popular Prospero's Cell, Lawrence Durrell brought Corfu to life, attracting tens of thousands of visitors to the island. With Reflections on a Marine Venus, he turns to Rhodes: ranging over its past and present, touching with wit and insights on the history and myth which the landscape embodies, and presenting some real and some imagined. With the same wit, tenderness and poetic insight that characterized Prospero's Cell, Reflections on a Marine Venus is an excellent introduction the Eastern Mediterranean.