This novel tells the story of two people who want the same things - fidelity, love, family life and a stable home. They are out of line with the fashions of the 60s, but life seems to smile on them until Harriet's fifth pregnancy, when everything starts to go wrong...
The second in Doris Lessing's visionary novel cycle "Canopus in Argos: Archives". It is a mix of fable, futuristic fantasy and pseudo-documentary accounts of 20th-century history.
This is a collection of stories about Africa which evoke the people and continent, drawn from the author's experiences as a child in Southern Rhodesia.
From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the first instalment in the visionary novel cycle ''Canopus in Argos: Archives''. The story of the final days of our planet is told through the reports of Johor, an emissary sent from Canopus. Earth, now named Shikasta (the Stricken) by the kindly, paternalistic Canopeans who colonised it many centuries ago, is under the influence of the evil empire of Puttiora. War, famine, disease and environmental disasters ravage the planet. To Johor, mankind is a ''totally crazed species'', racing towards annihilation: his orders to save humanity set him what seems to be an impossible task. Blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing''s astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of our own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic self-destruction.
Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime''s achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She died in 2013.
The opening 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.
When we first meet Martha Quest, she is a girl of fifteen living with her parents on a poor African farm. She is eager for life and resentful of the deadening narrowness of home, and escapes to take a job as a typist in the local capital. Here, in the ''big city'', she encounters the real life she was so eager to know and understand. As a picture of colonial life, ''Martha Quest'' succeeds by the depth of its realism alone; but always at its centre is Martha, a sympathetic figure drawn with unrelenting objectivity.
Martha''s Africa is Doris Lessing''s Africa: the restrictive life of the farm; the atmosphere of racial fear and antagonism; the superficial sophistication of the city. And both Martha and Lessing are Children of Violence: the generation that was born of one world war and came of age in another, whose abrasive relationships with their parents, with one another, and with society are laid bare brilliantly by a writer who understands them better than any other.
The Good Terrorist follows Alice Mellings, a woman who transforms her home into a headquarters for a group of radicals who plan to join the IRA. As Alice struggles to bridge her ideology and her bourgeois upbringing, her companions encounter unexpected challenges in their quest to incite social change against complacency and capitalism. With a nuanced sense of the intersections between the personal and the political, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing creates in The Good Terrorist a compelling portrait of domesticity and rebellion.From the Trade Paperback edition.
In this portrait of Doris Lessing's homeland, the author recounts the visits she made to Zimbabwe in 1982, 1988, 1989 and 1992. The visits constitute a journey to the heart of a country whose history, landscape, people and spirit are evoked in this book.
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a collection of some of her finest short stories. For more than four decades, Doris Lessing''s work has observed the passion and confusion of human relations, holding a mirror up to our selves in her unflinching dissection of the everyday. From the magnificent ''To Room Nineteen'', a study of a dry, 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 superb collection of stories written over four decades, from the 1950s to the 1990s, bears stunning witness to Doris Lessing''s perspective on the human condition.
The companion to a series of lectures given by Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in which she addresses some of the most important questions facing us today.''This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that - a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice - or if we notice, belittle - equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization ...''In this published version of a series of perceptive and thought-provoking lectures, Lessing stresses the importance of independent thought, of questioning received opinion and fighting the lure of apathy. She argues that only if we are free to interrogate authority and disagree that despotism and ignorance can be defeated. We must examine ''ideas, from whatever source they come, to see how they may usefully contribute to our lives and to the societies we live in''.
