A critical and commercial success, the books present four perspectives on a single set of events and characters in Alexandria, Egypt, before and during World War II.

As Durrell explains in his preface to Balthazar, the four novels are an exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject-object relation, with modern love as the subject. The Quartet offers the same sequence of events to us through several points of view, allowing individual perspectives to change over time.

The four novels are:

Justine (1957)

Balthazar (1958)

Mountolive (1958)

Clea (1960)

In a 1959 Paris Review interview, Durrell described the ideas behind the Quartet in terms of a convergence of Eastern and Western metaphysics, based on Einstein's overturning of the old view of the material universe, and Freud's doing the same for the concept of stable personalities, yielding a new concept of reality. For all the novels' experiments with chronology and viewpoint, for many readers the appeal lies in the luxurious beauty of the writing; it is difficult to find writing that so prodigiously and intricately recreates atmosphere, place and fleeting emotion with such style.