Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #547428 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 276 pages

Customer Reviews

utter loveliness.
I wouldn't want to spoil the thing by saying too much, but it was a very interesting read, aside from being intensely pleasant. There's a certain delicacy, about death, and strife, and the drinking of wine. Durrell is well spoken and well informed: you might think, like I did, that the story of Cyprus isn't politically relevant. But I only thought that because I'm an ignorant American, and because I had yet to read this lovely book.

Memories of times lost
An evocative memoir of the author's stay [1953-6] in what's now Northern Cyprus. Much of the landscape was still as he described it when we visited Belle Pais, Famagusta, Kyrenia, and Nicosia, the Tree of Idleness and other sites on our hiking trip to Cyprus in 2001. His adventures in buying and maintaining a house rival those of Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence"written many years later. The peaceful interludes in the hills are marred by foreshadowing of the political turmoil and tragedies that would engulf Cyprus in the following decades, leading to the departure of Durrell and other foreign nationals. Some of those towns and even cities remain ghost towns to this day. Once hard to find, this book has now been deservedly reissued.