The Avignon Quintet is a five-volume series of novels by British writer Lawrence Durrell, published between 1974 and 1985.
The thematic materials range from a form of Gnosticism[1] blended with Catharism, obsession with mortality, Fascism, Nazism, and World War II to Holy Grail romances, metafiction, Quantum Mechanics,[2] and sexual identity.
He described them as "roped together like climbers on a rockface, but all independent... a series of books through which the same characters move for all the world as if to illustrate the notion of reincarnation.
While the Quintet did not receive the critical approval of his earlier Alexandria Quartet, Durrell was a bestselling and celebrated British author in this period.
Records of the Swedish Academy that were opened in 2012 revealed that he had been on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, the year that the American writer John Steinbeck was selected.