Mountolive

“The sometimes Shakespearean actor Nicholas Boulton is the perfect narrator for the third book in the cherished Alexandria Quartet. And no, you needn't have listened to the others; this novel is a universe unto itself. Boulton fully inhabits the often drunk, always stuffy, plainly ridiculous characters who ran the empire on which a British sun refused to set. Without attempting mimicry, he shifts his voice to play the Egyptian beauty in one line, her English lover in the next. His tongue wraps deftly around Durrell's vast and sometimes prickly vocabulary…This witty tragedy will have you chortling happily until it wrings your heart. And then, if you are like this listener, you'll begin again at the beginning. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.” —AudioFile

“Mountolive is British Ambassador to Egypt and it is through his eyes and the eyes of various of his friends, both British and Egyptian, that we are shown the actual facts of the political and religious intrigue that has been motivating the Hosnani family…The work is an impressive, exacting and exciting study of the many faces of truth, with the varieties of love as a major secondary theme against which to test the first.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)