The Nobel Prize winner reflects on living "in a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures."In this perceptive collection of essays, Doris Lessing considers the savage past of our species and the remnants of it that seem to regularly erupt in our supposedly advanced and civilized world. Ultimately, she directly addresses the prime questions before us all: how to think for ourselves, how to understand what ...

"One of the most authentic books ever written about the English....Funny, touching and so real that the smell and taste of London seem to rise from its pages." — San Francisco ChronicleIn Pursuit of the English is a novelist's account of a lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous, funny, pathetic, full-blooded life in a working-class rooming house. It is a shrewd and unsentimental picture of Londoners you've probably never met or even read about--though t...

"A keen sociological eye for class and ideology; an understanding of the contradictory impulses of the human heart; an ability to conjure a place, a mood and a time through seemingly matter-of-fact descriptions." — Michiko Kakutani, New York TimesShocking, intimate, often uncomfortably honest, Adore reaffirms Doris Lessing's unrivaled ability to capture the truth of the human condition.Roz and Lil have been best friends s...

"There is passion here, a piercing accuracy, a rare sensitivity and power. . . . One can only marvel." — New York TimesSet in Southern Rhodesia under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is at once a riveting chronicle of human disintegration, a beautifully understated social critique, and a brilliant depiction of the quiet horror of one woman's struggle against a ruthless fate.Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young ...

Doris Lessing's contemporary gothic horror story—centered on the birth of a baby who seems less than human—probes society's unwillingness to recognize its own brutality.Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll of domestic bliss in defiance of the social trends of late 1960s England. While around them crime and unrest surge, the Lovatts are certain that their old-fashioned contentment can protect them from the world outside—until the birth of their fifth bab...

"I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do." — Barbara KingsolverIntelligent, sensitive, and fiercely passionate, Martha Quest is a young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood. She is a romantic idealistic in revolt ag...

A highly personal story of the eminent British writer returning to her African roots that is "brilliant . . . [and] captures the contradictions of a young country." — New York Times Book ReviewA rich and penetrating portrait of Lessing's homeland, African Laughter recounts the visits she made to Zimbabwe in 1982, 1988, 1989, and 1992, after being exiled from the old Southern Rhodesia for 25 years for her opposition to the minority white government. Lessing uses memory and reminisce...

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

"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 midd...

As the summer begins, Kate Brown -- attractive, intelligent, forty five, happily enough married, with a house in the London suburbs and three grown children -- has no reason to expect anything will change. But when the summer ends, the woman she was -- living behind a protective camouflage of feminine charm and caring -- no longer exists. This novel. Doris Lessing's brilliant excursion into the terrifying stretch of time between youth and old age, is her journey: from London to Turkey to S...

Shocking, intimate, oftenuncomfortably honest, these stories reaffirm Doris Lessing’s unequalled abilityto capture the truth of the human conditionIn the title novel, two friendsfall in love with each other's teenage sons, and these passions last for years,until the women end them, vowing a respectable old age. In Victoriaand the Staveneys, a young woman gives birth to a child of mixedrace and struggles with feelin...