Justine

The first book of the Alexandria Quartet, in which a schoolteacher looks back on his love for the restless, magnetic Justine, wife of the wealthy Copt Nessim, in the cosmopolitan Alexandria of the years before the Second World War. The city is the true protagonist, Durrell's 'capital of memory': the sweep of the Corniche, the Cecil Hotel on the seafront, the crowded cosmopolitan and Arab quarters, and Lake Mareotis south of the town where a duck shoot ends in death.

Darley

Alexandria (the Corniche)

Part 1

From an island years later, the schoolteacher Darley reassembles Alexandria out of memory, and the long sweep of the Corniche, the sea light and the crowds, is where the reconstruction begins. The city itself, many-tongued and corrupt and beautiful, is the book's true subject, more than any of its lovers.

Part 1

explicit The narrator's Alexandria is the real city and above all its great seafront curve, the Corniche along the eastern harbour, which frames the whole book's remembered life.

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Justine

The Cecil Hotel

Part 1

It is in the lobbies and rooms of hotels like the Cecil that Darley first circles Justine, the married woman whose restless hunger draws in everyone around her. Her love affair with Darley, conducted through the cafés and rooms of the seafront, is the flame the first book follows.

Part 1

explicit The Cecil Hotel on the seafront at Saad Zaghloul Square is a real Alexandria landmark of the period; Durrell used it and it recurs through the Quartet as a meeting place.

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