Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, Ten-Thirty on a summer night, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas

Tight, square, uncreased spine. Clean, unmarked interior. Pages are lightly toned. Only very gentle shelf-wear. The characters in Duras's novels, writes Germaine Bree in her intro to this omnibus, '[live] vicariously events which they both retell and relive in another key; someone else's story, always relived in different modes, yet always the same. Desire and love, as in all romances, well up within them and fatally encounter the hard boundaries of a reality that inevitability circumscribes, limits, modifies, and destroys.' Written between 1955 and 1962, these four dialogue-driven works were compiled by Grove in the wake of the author's successful collaboration with director Alain Resnais, Hiroshima Mon Amour. Two of these novels were adapted for performance: Moderato Cantabile, which Peter Brooks directed in 1960 (the English title is Seven Days . . . Seven Nights) and The Square, whose radio-play adaptation caused an epiphanic reaction in Samuel Beckett. 303 pp.