Tunc marks Lawrence Durrell’s turn from the lush eroticism of The Alexandria Quartet toward something colder and more speculative, and honestly, more 'grubby' eroticism.

Set in a technologically ascendant Europe, it follows a man drawn into a shadowy corporate-religious nexus concerned with cybernetics, mysticism, and power. The novel sits at the uneasy meeting point of late modernism and early techno-paranoia.

Durrell’s prose remains excessive, but here it presses against systems—capital, bureaucracy, spiritual hunger in an engineered world. Published in 1968, it anticipates later anxieties about technocracy and corporate transcendence without abandoning Durrell’s taste for metaphysical intrigue.

It is less beloved than the Quartet, but quite curious: a bridge between literary modernism and speculative unease.