Livia; or, Buried Alive is the second volume of Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet, returning to the Provençal and metaphysical terrain opened in Monsieur.

Here the story deepens around Livia, Blanford, Constance, and the wider cast of real and imagined figures, as Durrell folds love, youth, memory, war, authorship, and narrative invention into one another.

This is Durrell in his ornate, unstable mode: sensuous, self-aware, sunlit and death-haunted, with the novel constantly aware of itself as a made thing. Best for readers of twentieth-century literary fiction, modernist afterlives, European settings, and books where people discuss love as though it were both a private catastrophe and a minor branch of metaphysics.

First UK edition, Faber hardback, 1978. Very good in dust jacket, with light jacket wear, mild toning, and minor edge/corner wear.