Constance; or, Solitary Practices is the central volume of Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet, moving through wartime Europe and North Africa as private lives are caught inside larger historical convulsions.

Constance, a psychoanalyst, becomes one of Durrell’s great organising presences here: moving between desire, exile, war, memory, and the unstable forms of knowledge people use when the world has stopped pretending to be coherent.

It’s Durrell at full density: sensuous, cerebral, politically shadowed, and structurally elaborate, with Cairo, Geneva, Avignon, and the war all folding into the novel’s erotic and metaphysical machinery. Best for readers of late modernist fiction, European literary excess, wartime novels that are not remotely plain, and books where every room contains wine, history, and at least one person having a symbolic crisis.

First UK edition, Faber hardback, 1982. Very good in dust jacket, with light jacket wear, mild edge wear, and some page toning/spotting. Clean internally from photos.