Doris Lessing

A collection of literary essays and criticism by the award-winning author of The Golden Notebook and The Sweetest Dream includes her reviews of classic books, commentaries on world politics, and insights into the role of personal experience in the creation of literature. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

A fascinating novel of love and ecology from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Assembled here for the first time in book form are the very best occasional writings from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. A selection of the very best of Doris Lessing's essays: articles on writers as diverse as Jane Austen, Muriel Spark, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and Mikael Bulgakov sit alongside autobiographical looks at the beliefs that have shaped Lessing’s thinking. There are adoring and adorable pieces on the beloved cats that she has allowed to share her life, and insightful looks at the Africa in which she grew up, and London and England, the place where she made her home. The range of subjects, cultures and periods within these essays is huge, but the collection is utterly consistent in one key regard: Doris Lessing’s clear-eyed vision and clearly expressed prose are present throughout. There is a huge amount of wisdom and entertainment in these pages, shot through with Lessing’s infectiously forthright, zestful and impish spirit.

The critically lauded author of The Sweetest Dream explores the rich complexities of the human condition in four short novels that include the title novella, Victoria and Staveneys, The Reason for It, and A Love Child, in which a soldier becomes convinced that a child resulted from his brief wartime love affair. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.

Four novellas by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, that once again show her to be unequalled in her ability to capture the truth of the human condition. The title story, ‘The Grandmothers’, is an astonishing tour de force, a shockingly intimate portrait of an unconventional extended family and the lengths to which they will go to find happiness and love. Written with a keen cinematic eye, the story is a ruthless dissection of the veneer of middle-class morality and convention. ‘Victoria and the Staveneys’, takes us through 20 years of the life of a young underprivileged black girl in London. A chance meeting introduces her to the Staveneys – a liberal white middle-class family – and, seduced, she falls pregnant by one of the sons. As her daughter grows up, Victoria feels her parental control diminishing as the attractions of the Staveneys’ world exert themselves. An honest and often uncomfortable look at race relations in London over the past few decades, Lessing reaffirms her brilliance at demonstrating the effect of society on the individual. With these novellas, and ‘The Reason for It’ and ‘A Love Child’, Lessing proves once again that she is one of our most valuable and insightful living authors.

As Frances Lennox and her two sons try to make the best of their situation, which requires that they live with her conservative mother-in-law, her ex-husband Comrade Johnny dumps his second wife's problem child at her feet, in a dramatic novel that revisits the 1960s and recreates the tumultuous politcal landscape of the time, detailing the different male and female experiences of this era. Reader's Guide available. Reprint.

From "To Room Nineteen", a study of a controlled middle class marriage "grounded in intelligence", to the shocking "A Woman on the Roof", where a workman becomes obsessed with a pretty sunbather, this collection of stories bears witness to Doris Lessing's perspective on the human condition.

Nobel Prize for Literature winner Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in one of her most involving, personal, political novels.

First published in 1984, under a pseudonym, as ‘The Diary of a Good Neighbour’ and ‘If the Old Could …’, now published as ‘The Diaries of Jane Somers’, this is in many ways classic Lessing. As resonant with social and political themes as ‘The Golden Notebook’, Lessing returns to the realism of her early fiction with the wisdom and experience of maturity. The diaries introduce us to Jane, an intelligent and beautiful magazine editor concerned with success, clothes and comfort. But her real inadequacy is highlighted when first her husband, then her mother, die from cancer and Jane feels strangely removed. In an attempt to fill this void, she befriends ninety-something Maudie, whose poverty and squalor contrast so radically with the glamour and luxury of the magazine world. The two gradually come to depend on each other – Maudie delighting Jane with tales of London in the 1920s and Jane trying to care for the rapidly deteriorating old woman. ‘The Diary of Jane Somers’ contrasts the helplessness of the elderly with that of the young as Jane is forced to care for her nineteen-year-old drop-out niece Kate who is struggling with an emotional breakdown. Jane realises that she understands young people as little as she so recently did the old.

A visionary novel from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is sooner than you might think. And the Earth’s climate is much changed – it’s colder than ever before in the north, and unbearably dry and hot in the south. Mara, who is seven, and her four-year-old brother Dann find themselves somewhere very strange, not home … They are taken in by a kindly, grandmotherly woman, but this new life is hard: hunger, dirt, thirst and danger are the children’s constant companions. Drought and fire carry off their adoptive home and force them to set off northward into the unknown, to experience a series of adventures that bring them to an altogether altered world, where they can start to learn and build anew. Doris Lessing has written a compelling, troubling and entertaining novel that, through the remarkable odyssey of a brother and sister living in the imagined future, manages to tell us a great deal about the present we perceive only dimly and scarcely know how to value.

"Tenderly perceptive....A resounding affirmation of humanity and what it holds dearest, from one of our most gifted storytellers."-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)Thousands of years in the future, all the northern hemisphere is buried under the ice and snow of a new Ice Age. At the southern end of a large landmass called Ifrik, two children of the Mahondi people, seven-year old Mara and her younger brother, Dann, are abducted from their home in the middle of the night. Raised as outsiders in a poor rural village, Mara and Dann learn to survive the hardships and dangers of a life threatened as much by an unforgiving climate and menacing animals as by a hostile community of Rock People. Eventually they join the great human migration North, away from the drought that is turning the southern land to dust, and in search of a place with enough water and food to support human life. Traveling across the continent, the siblings enter cities rife with crime, power struggles, and corruption, learning as much about human nature as about how societies function. With a clear-eyed vision of the human condition, Mara and Dann is imaginative fiction at its best.

"The Golden Notebook is Doris Lessing's most important work and has left its mark upon the ideas and feelings of a whole generation of women." -- New York Times Book ReviewAnna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

The second volume of the autobiography of Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. ‘Walking in the Shade’ begins in 1949, as Doris Lessing arrives in London with nothing but her young son and the manuscript of her first novel. With humour and clear-sightedness, she records her battles of the next decade: her involvement with communism, her love affairs, her struggle with poverty, the difficulties she faced as a young single mother. But as well there is the success of that first novel, ‘The Grass Is Singing’, and meetings with personalities and opinion-makers – Kenneth Tynan, John Osborne, Bertrand Russell and others.Describing, too, the genesis of ‘The Golden Notebook’, this book sees Lessing emerge as one of the most exciting, and groundbreaking, novelists of the post-war generation, and one of the twentieth century’s great writers.

A fierce, compelling account of the nature and origins of love from Doris Lessing, one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century and winner of the Nobel Pize for Literature 2007.

"She has revealed that brilliant kernel at the heart of it all that we recognize as the truth." -- Francine Prose, Washington Post Book WorldLove, Again tells the story of a 65-year-old woman who falls in love and struggles to maintain her life as she knows it. Widowed for many years, with grown children, Sarah is a writer who works in the theater in London. During the production of a play, she falls in love with a seductive young actor, the beautiful and androgynous 28-year-old Bill, and then with the more mature 35-year-old director Henry. Finding herself in a state of longing and desire that she had thought was the province of younger women, Sarah is compelled to explore and examine her own personal history of love, from her earliest childhood desires to her most recent obsessions. The result is a brilliant anatomy of love from a master of human psychology who remains one of the most daring writers of fiction at work today.

Three acclaimed works for the stage by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Written from 1950s to the 1970s, the three plays collected here reflect the social and political concerns of the times, and are rich with Doris Lessing’s characteristic passion and incisiveness. ‘Play with a Tiger’ follows the fortunes of Anna and Dave, representatives of the emerging post-war classless society, and their attempts to find a blueprint for living. ‘The Singing Door’, written for children, is a highly experimental play, a clever and witty allegorical study of power games. ‘Each His Own Wilderness’ tells the story of Myra, who has fought all her life for the socialist ideal, and who must now come to terms with the fact that despite her best efforts, her son is indifferent to her politics.

The fourth book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner's 'Children of Violence' series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.

The fifth and final book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner's 'Children of Violence' series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.

A collection of interviews with the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature that serves as an invaluable companion to her work.

"Africa belongs to the Africans; the sooner they take it back the better. But--a country also belongs to those who feel at home in it. Perhaps it may be that love of Africa the country will be strong enough to link people who hate each other now. Perhaps..." Going Home is Doris Lessing's powerful nonfiction memoir of her first journey back to Africa, the land in which she grew up and in which so much of her emotion and her concern are still invested. Returning to Southern Rhodesia in 1956, she found that her love of the country had remained as strong as her hatred of the idea of "white supremacy" espoused by its ruling class. Going Home evokes brilliantly the experience of the people, black and white, who have shaped and will shape a beloved country. In this unflinching work of social commentary, Lessing explores the charged landscape of a nation on the brink: A Raw Portrait of Colonial Africa: Journey with Lessing back to 1956 Southern Rhodesia, a land she loves, ruled by a system of racial inequality she despises. Incisive Social Commentary: Witness through Lessing's sharp, observant eye the daily realities of apartheid and the rigid structure of white supremacy. A Personal Memoir: A deeply personal account of returning to the place that shaped her, grappling with a complex sense of home, identity, and belonging. The Human Experience: Lessing evokes the lives of both black and white people, caught together in a system that pits them against each other, in a country beloved by all.