Written from Lawrence Durrell’s years on Corfu before the Second World War, Prospero’s Cell is a diary, but also an act of imaginative possession.

First published in 1945, the book belongs to a form of Mediterranean writing in which the foreign observer turns place into style. Durrell records weather, fishing, local customs, conversations, food and the island’s shifting light, making up a private geography: Corfu as a place where landscape, myth and daily life continually bleed into one another.

Durrell’s prose can be lush, theatrical and occasionally burdened by the colonial confidence of its period; the island and its inhabitants are sometimes made to serve his own aesthetic mythology. Yet the book remains compelling for its formal looseness and sensory precision, and for the way it preserves a world already understood as vulnerable to disappearance. For readers of literary travel writing, island narratives and books that treat landscape as a kind of consciousness.

Faber & Faber, 2021 paperback edition, second printing. Light edge wear and minor cover marking.