Timed to coincide with Women's History Month, a new edition of the powerful and liberating feminist novel that raised the consciousness of an entire generation.
The second volume of novelist Doris Lessing's autobiography. Born in Iran of English parents, Lessing lived in England as a small child but was eventually taken to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with her family and raised there. Volume 2 describes her life after she moved back to England following the publication of her first novel in 1949.
Harriet and David Levatt defy the chaotic, unconstrained 1960s with a closely-guarded, nurturing family environment. Into an already large family, which Harriet tends while David works, their fifth child is born. Ben, an ugly, violent, demanding baby, is shockingly alien to their comfortable, kind home--his mother cannot love him and his father ...
Kate Brown, aged 45, leaves her home and her self-sacrificing, passive life there. She spends the summer as a translator of Portuguese, traveling to Turkey and Spain and having an affair with a younger man. When she returns to London, she is able to accept her aging, her husband's affairs, and the fact that she is no longer essential to her ...
Nobel Laureate Lessing offers a moving meditation on parents and children, war and memory, and she explores the lives of her parents, two individuals irrevocably damaged by the Great War, in this work that combines fiction and memoir. Photos throughout.
This novel is widely considered to be Lessing's masterpiece. Anna Wulf, a writer living in London, attempts to conquer the chaos of her life by using five notebooks as journals: the black one deals with her life in colonial Africa, the red is her Communist experiences, the yellow is a more or less fictionalized chronicle of Anna's alter ego Ella, ...
A disturbing allegory, centered around a planet called Shikasta, which bears remarkable similarities to Earth. Through time, a higher planet, Canopus, has documented the progress of Shikasta and tried to distract its inhabitants from the evil influence of the planet Shammat, but the Shikastans continue to hurl themselves toward annihilation.
Mary Turner, a white woman married to a white farmer in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), is both afraid of and attracted to Moses, a black farmhand. Issues of prejudice, and what was known as "the colour bar", provide the backdrop for this novel of a woman's gradual disintegration and violent death.
In this portrait of Doris Lessing's homeland, the author recounts the visits she made to Zimbabwe in 1982, 1988, 1989 and 1992, after being banned from the old Southern Rhodesia for 25 years for her political views and opposition to the minority white Government. The visits constitute a journey to the heart of a country whose history, landscape, ...
Consisting of the celebrated story collections "Particularly Cats" and "Rufus the Survivor," and the memoir "The Old Age of El Magnifico," this book brilliantly evokes the subtleties of feline existence. An entertaining read for both cat and Lessing connoisseurs.--"The Observer."
As the world falls apart outside, the narrator watches over Emily, a young child brought into her care by a stranger. Emily is also guarded by Hugo, half cat and half dog, the bizarre and lovable beast whose presence dominates the tale.
These two novels, THE DIARY OF A GOOD NEIGHBOR and IF THE OLD COULD, are published as a single volume now, but at the time of their original publication, they were submitted as separate novels by Lessing under the pseudonym Jane Somers. This ploy was an attempt by Lessing to confirm her suspicions that young unknown writers were not taken ...
This first part of Doris Lessing's autobiography covers her African childhood and youth, her involvement in communist politics, and her departure for England and a new life. It is a self-portrait of a woman who lived through "an extraordinary time, the end of the British Empire in Africa". Being lifted high up onto her father's horse, watching ...
These four short works include VICTORIA AND THE STAVENEYS (which contrasts the life of a young black woman with that of a wealthy family of whites), THE REASON FOR IT (a spinoff from Lessing's sci-fi oeuvre), A LOVE CHILD (about the brief love affair between an English soldier in World War II and an unhappily married South African woman), and the ...
Stunning new edition of this classic African story collection 'It can be said of all white-dominated Africa that it was -- and still is -- the Old Chief's Country. So all the stories I write of a certain kind I think of as belonging under that heading; tales about white people, sometimes about black people, living in a landscape that not so very ...
Lessing's dystopian novel is set in the future, in a post-apocalyptic land called Ifrik. The plot involves a sister and brother who grow to adulthood in a world in which war has eliminated every certainty. Discovering the story of their murky past life, they make the decision to rebel against the new regime.
The fifth book in the "Children of Violence" series, a quintet of novels tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa through to old age in a post-nuclear Britain. The other books are "Martha Quest", "A Proper Marriage", "A Ripple from the Storm" and "Landlocked".
All of Doris Lessing's short fiction is represented here, with the exception of her African stories. Set in the cosmopolitan worlds of London, Paris, the south of France, and the English countryside, these 35 short works are thoughtful explorations of love, marriage, lust, and the condition of women. "Her grasp of what is actually happening in the ...
The first in Lessings' Children of Violence series, MARTHA QUEST introduces Martha at age 15, chafing at the restraints of her bourgeois home and domineering mother. As soon as she is able, Martha leaves her rural home for the city, where she joins a political left-wing group, has her first sexual experience, and meets and marries her husband. In ...
Beginning with Kennedy's assassination in 1963, Doris Lessing's very autobiographical novel chronicles, over two decades, the story of Frances Lennox, her two sons, and her unsavory ex-husband, Johnny, a self-important Marxist who drops in and out of her life wreaking various kinds of havoc. At the end of the novel, a peripheral character named ...
These brief essays are explorations of human behavior from the point of view of a woman who has spent her life questioning the moral issues associated with war, racism, and politics. Always tolerant, humane, and wise, Lessing also remains hopeful in the face of a century of prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and blatant abuse of human rights.
Based on the work of psychoanalyst R. D. Laing, this novel explores issues of psychic wholeness. Charles Watkins, a Cambridge University classics professor, is navigating the Atlantic Ocean on a raft after a UFO has abducted his companions. He arrives at an island where he finds the ruins of an ancient city. There, he is transported to a sort of ...
Widowed for many years, and with grown children, a 65-year-old woman falls in love again and struggles to maintain her sanity. 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 ...
Doris Lessing, one of England's finest living novelists, invites us to imagine a mythical society free from sexual intrigue, free from jealousy, free from petty rivalries: a society free from men. An old Roman senator, contemplative at his late stage of life, embarks on what will likely be his last endeavour: the retelling of the story of human ...
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