"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...

"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...

"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 ...

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 ...

This major collection contains all of Doris Lessing’s short fiction, other than the stories set in Africa, from the beginning of her career until now. Set in London, Paris, the south of France, the English countryside, these thirty-five stories reflect the themes that have always characterized Lessing’s work: the bedrock realities of marriage and other relationships between men and women; the crisis of the individual whose very psyche is threatened by a society unattuned to its own most da...

'An extremely mature psychological study. [The Grass Is Singing] is full of touches of truth seldom mentioned but instantly recognized. By any standards, this, book shows remarkable powers and imagination.' - New Statesman 'Emotional unity and force ... one of her best works' - New York Reviewof Books 'Her impressive first novel is told with all the intensity and passion Miss Lessing compacts into all her work' - St. Louis Post-Dispatch 'There is passion here, a piercing accuracy a rare se...

From Doris Lessing, "one of the most important writers of the past hundred years" (Times of London), comes a brilliant, darkly provocative alternative history of humankind's beginnings.In this fascinating and beguiling novel, Lessing confronts the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women manage to live side by side in the world and how the troublesome particulars of gender affect every aspect of our existence.In the last ye...

"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...

"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...

Doris Lessing's love affair with cats began at a young age, when she became intrigued with the semiferal creatures on the African farm where she grew up. Her fascination with the handsome, domesticated creatures that have shared her flats and her life in London remained undiminished, and grew into real love with the awkwardly lovable El Magnifico, the last cat to share her home.On Cats is a celebrated classic, a memoir in which we meet the cats that have slunk and bullied and charm...

I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.In this extraordinary book, the 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, each irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English far...

“[Lessing] is a pro, writing at the top of her powers, realistically, passionately, accessibly…. a stirring novel”—San Francisco ChronicleFrances Lennox stands at her stove, bringing another feast to readiness before ladling it out to the youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table—her two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends and new friends fresh off the street. It’s London in the 1960s and everything is being challenged and changed.But ...