A compelling vision of a disorienting and barbaric future from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.Many years in the future, city life has broken down, communications have failed and food supplies are dwindling. From her window a middle-aged woman – our narrator – watches things fall apart and records what she witnesses: hordes of people migrating to the countryside, gangs of children roaming the streets. One day, a young girl, Emily, is brought to her house by ...

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...

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 ravag...

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...

This collection brings together three of Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing’s most acclaimed novels.Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, is the story of Mary, a new wife, lonely and trapped in the African bush, until she turns to Moses, the black cook, for kindness and understanding.A landmark of twentieth-century literature, The Golden Notebok is a powerful account of Anna Wulf, a woman searching for her personal and political identity, recording her emotional and creative...

The Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing’s first novel is a taut and tragic portrayal of a crumbling marriage, set in Rhodesia during the years of Apartheid.Doris Lessing brought the manuscript of ‘The Grass is Singing’ with her when she left Southern Rhodesia and came to England in 1950. When it was first published it created an impact whose reverberations we are still feeling, and immediately established itself as a landmark in twentieth-century literature.Set in Rhodesia, it...

The story of a middle-aged woman’s search for freedom, from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.Her four children have flown, her husband is otherwise occupied, and after twenty years of being a good wife and mother, Kate Brown is free for a summer of adventure. She plunges into an affair with a younger man, travelling abroad with him, and, on her return to England, meets an extraordinary young woman whose charm and freedom of spirit encourages Kate in her own l...

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing, a short story about a young woman’s attempts to juggle her political beliefs with everyday life.On the day that the newspapers report that Stalin is dying, a young woman, with communist sympathies, attempts to look after her aunt and cousin on a disastrous trip to a photographer.Lightly satirical about the absurd ways people can behave, no matter what their political views, ‘The Day Stalin Died’ shows Doris L...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

The first volume of the autobiography of Doris Lessing, author of ‘The Grass is Singing’ and ‘The Golden Notebook’, and Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.Winner of the James Tait Black Prize 1994.The first volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography begins with her childhood in Africa and ends on her arrival in London in 1949 with the typescript of her first novel in her suitcase. it charts the evolution first of her consciousness, then of her sexuality and finally ...