Sebastian; or, Ruling Passions is the fourth volume in Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet, moving between postwar Europe, Egypt, religious secrecy, psychoanalysis, erotic memory, and the layered games of fiction itself.

Sebastian Affad is drawn back into the orbit of a Gnostic sect after a fatal message and a doctrinal mix-up, while Constance and the wider Durrellian universe continue to tangle love, metaphysics, history, and feverish conversation.

This is late Durrell in full silk-and-incense mode: elliptical, sensual, clever, occasionally absurd, and very much not interested in behaving like a tidy realist novel. Best for readers already curious about Durrell, twentieth-century literary excess, modernist afterlives, and books where theology and desire keep slipping into the same room and pretending it was an accident.

First UK edition, Faber hardback, 1983. Ex-library copy with stamps, labels, and borrowing sheet. Very good reading copy in dust jacket, with light jacket wear and mild page toning.