The Black Book

The controversial third novel - banned for decades in the US and the UK - by one of the bestselling, most celebrated English novelists of the late 20th century, Lawrence Durrell.

The Black Book, written when Durrell was only twenty-four, was first published in France in 1938 but did not appear in America until 1960 or the UK until 1973 because of obscenity laws. Centring around a group of characters staying in a seedy London hotel in the 1930s, it a novel of sex, death and isolation, fuelled by passion, anger and artistic innovation.

'The first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction.' T. S. Eliot

'This is a wild, passionate, brilliantly gaudy and flamboyant extravaganza; it is intrinsically and essentially, the book of a young man ... richly obscene, energetically morbid, very often very funny indeed, self-pitying, but, above all, stylistically and verbally inventive as no other young man's novel of the period was even attempting to be.' Philip Toynbee, Observer