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 obsesse...

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing, a short story about a young boy’s coming of age.While on holiday with his mother, a young boy sees a group of older children jumping from a rock into deep sea. He feels compelled to challenge himself to match them, and in doing so will take his first steps away from childhood.An amazingly vivid short story, Through the Tunnel explores the difficulties of childhood and ageing, resonating with many of Doris Les...

A classic tale from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, of a family torn apart by the arrival of Ben, their feral fifth child.‘Listening to the laughter, the sounds of children playing, Harriet and David would reach for each other’s hand, and smile, and breathe happiness.’Four children, a beautiful old house, the love of relatives and friends – Harriet and David Lovatt’s life is a glorious hymn to domestic bliss and old-fashioned family values. But when...

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing, a short story about a woman’s gradual drift outside the limits of society.An old woman, with gipsy blood, begins to find the conventions of society stifling – when her husband dies, and her children leave home, she embraces a marginal, unconventional existence, accompanied by her faithful cat.‘An Old Woman and Her Cat’ brilliantly combines Doris Lessing’s unforgiving examination of our society – and those it ...

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the fourth instalment in the visionary novel cycle ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’.The handsome, intelligent people of Planet 8 of the Canopean Empire know only an idyllic existence on their bountiful planet, its weather consistently nurturing, never harsh. They live long, purposeful, untroubled lives.Then one day The Ice begins, and ice and snow cover the planet’s surface. Crops and animals die off, and the people mus...

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the third instalment in the visionary novel cycle ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’.Ambien II is one of the Five – the highest level of the Sirian Colonial Service and the hidden rulers of the Sirian Empire for thousands of years. She is an accomplished administrator, a mover of populations and controller of events – and lives in the certain knowledge that the Sirian Empire is the most advanced in the galaxy.A...

A hugely significant political novel for the late twentieth century from one of the outstanding writers of the modern era and winner of the Nobel Prize for Fiction.In a London squat a band of bourgeois revolutionaries are united by a loathing of the waste and cruelty they see around them. These maladjusted malcontents try desperately to become involved in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence. Only Alice seems capable of organising anything. Motherly, practical ...

The landmark novel of the Sixties – a powerful account of a woman searching for her personal, political and professional identity while facing rejection and betrayal.In 1950s London, novelist Anna Wulf struggles with writer’s block. Divorced with a young child, and fearful of going mad, Anna records her experiences in four coloured notebooks: black for her writing life, red for political views, yellow for emotions, blue for everyday events. But it is a fifth notebook – the golden n...

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 suc...

By turns, an unsparing and joyous account of life in a postwar London rooming house by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.In 1949, Doris Lessing left her native Southern Africa in search of a grail – a life of glamour and refinement that she naively believed England offered everyone. A fascinating, hilarious memoir of her first impressions of her adopted country, 'In Pursuit of the English' brilliantly captures Lessing's constant wonder at and growing affe...

The first volume of Doris Lessing’s ‘Collected African Stories’, and a classic work from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.‘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 long ago was settled by black tribes, living in complex societies th...

Nobel Prize for Literature winner Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in one of her most involving, personal, political novels.It’s the morning of the 1960s and it’s suppertime at Freedom Hall, the most welcoming household in north London. Frances Lennox stands at her stove, preparing another feast before ladling it out to the youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table – here are her two sons, smarting at their upbringing but beginning to absorb their ...