The distinguished French-Alexandrian novelist Claude Vincendon died in 1967, leaving unpublished her Golden Silence (1964), the typescript of which was recently discovered. The book focusses on the life of a mute girl who has been cursed by the Evil Eye, and her life in her native Alexandria, in England and Australia. The text has been edited, with commentaries, by Sibylle Vincendon (the author’s niece), Richard Pine and David Green. The exploratory essays contained in the present book address Claude Vincendon’s life; the background to her aristocratic family in Alexandria; her marriage to Irishman Tim Forde and their life together in Ireland, Australia and Israel; Claude’s second marriage to Lawrence Durrell, and their working life together in Cyprus and France; the inter-connection between their literary works; Claude’s first three novels, published in the 1960s by Faber and Faber; the social and political conditions in post-war Egypt, Britain and Australia; the construction of Golden Silence and the psychological character of silence itself; the phenomenon of the Evil Eye; and the concept of Nemesis which permeates Golden Silence.

DIVDIVThe final installment of the Alexandria Quartet, hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “one of the most important works of our time”/divDIV /divDIVYears after his liaisons with Justine and Melissa, Darley becomes immersed in a relationship with Clea, a bisexual artist. The ensuing chain of events transforms not only the lovers, but the dead as well, and leads to the series’ brilliant and unexpected resolution. /divDIV /divDIVPraised by Life as among the “most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time,” Clea carries on Durrell’s assured and unwavering style, and confirms the series’ standing as a resounding masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook contains a new introduction by Jan Morris./div /div

Alec Issigonis is the creator of some of the most celebrated car designs of the 20th century. Gillian Bardsley tells the personal story of this complex and truly gifted man.

The “virtuoso” author’s memoir of his spiritual journey with famed Taoist philosopher Jolan Chang (The New York Times). Beginning with their first meeting over lunch at Lawrence Durrell’s Provencal home, Durrell and Jolan Chang—renowned Taoist philosopher and expert on Eastern sexuality—developed an enduring relationship based on mutual spiritual exploration. Durrell’s autobiographical rumination on their friendship and on Taoism recounts the author’s existential ponderings, starting with his introduction to the mystical and enigmatic “smile in the mind’s eye.” From parsimony, cooking, and yoga to poetry, Petrarch, and Nietzche, A Smile in the Mind’s Eye is a charming tale of a writer’s spiritual and philosophical awakening.

This book is a literary, social, and political portrait of Alexandria at a high point of its history. Drawing on diaries, letters, and interviews, Michael Haag recovers the lost life of the city, its cosmopolitan inhabitants, and its literary characters. Located on the coast of Africa yet rich in historical associations with Western civilization, Alexandria was home to an exotic variety of people whose cosmopolitan families had long been rooted in the commerce and the culture of the entire Mediterranean world. Alexandria famously excited the imaginations of writers, and Haag folds intimate accounts of E. M. Forster, Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, and Lawrence Durrell into the story of its inhabitants. He recounts the city’s experience of the two world wars and explores the communities that gave Alexandria its unique flavor: the Greek, the Italian, and the Jewish. The book deftly harnesses the sexual and emotional charge of cosmopolitan life in this extraordinary city, and highlights the social and political changes over the decades that finally led to Nasser’s Egypt.

An extraordinary literary event: Daniel Mendelsohn’s acclaimed two-volume translation of the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy—including the first English translation of the poet’s final Unfinished Poems—now published in one handsome edition and featuring the fullest literary commentaries available in English, by the renowned critic, scholar, and international best-selling author of The Lost. No modern poet so vividly brought to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early-twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Whether advising Odysseus on his return to Ithaca or confronting the poet with the ghosts of his youth, these verses brilliantly make the historical personal—and vice versa. To his profound exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and identity, Cavafy brings the historian’s assessing eye along with the poet’s compassionate heart. After more than a decade of work and study, Mendelsohn—a classicist who alone among Cavafy’s translators shares the poet’s deep intimacy with the ancient world—gives readers full access to the genius of Cavafy’s verse: the sensuous rhymes, rich assonances, and strong rhythms of the original Greek that have eluded previous translators. Complete with the Unfinished Poems that Cavafy left in drafts when he died—a remarkable, hitherto unknown discovery that remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades—and with an in-depth introduction and a helpful commentary that situates each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this revelatory translation is a cause for celebration: the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.