Doris Lessing

A Ripple From the Storm

Children of Violence #3

by Doris Lessing

Martha Quest, the embodied heroine of the Children of Violence series, has been acclaimed as one of the greatest fictional creations in the English language. In a Ripple from the Storm, Doris Lessing charts...

The Four-Gated City

Children of Violence #5

by Doris Lessing

Dorris Lessing's classic series of autobiographical novels is the fictional counterpart to Under My Skin. In these five novels, first published in the 1950's and 60s, Doris Lessing transformed her fascinating...

The Real Thing

by Doris Lessing

The stories and sketches in this collection penetrate to the heart of human experience with the passion and intelligence readers have come to expect of Doris Lessing. Most of the piece are set in contemporary...

A Proper Marriage

Children of Violence #2

by Doris Lessing

An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of...

In Pursuit of the English

by Doris Lessing

In 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...

Time Bites: Views and Reviews

by Doris Lessing

In this collection of the very best of Doris Lessing's essays, we are treated to the wisdom and keen insight of a writer who has learned, over the course of a brilliant career spanning more than half a century,...

Going Home

by Doris Lessing

"Africa belongs to the Africans; the sooner they take it back the better. But--a country also belongs to those who feel at home in it. Perhaps it may be that love of Africa the country will be strong enough...

Martha Quest

Children of Violence #1

by Doris Lessing

Intelligent, 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...

Landlocked

Children of Violence #4

by Doris Lessing

In the aftermath of World War II, Martha Quest finds herself completely disillusioned. She is losing faith with the communist movement in Africa, and her marriage to one of the movement's leaders is disintegrating....

Ben, In the World

by Doris Lessing

At eighteen, Ben is in the world, but not of it. He is too large, too awkward, too inhumanly made. Now estranged from his family, he must find his own path in life. From London and the south of France to Brazil...

Walking in the Shade

by Doris Lessing & Doris M. Lessing

The second volume of Doris Lessing's extraordinary autobiography covers the years 1949-62, from her arrival in war-weary London with her son, Peter, and the manuscript for her first novel, The Grass is Singing,...

Love Again: A Novel

by Doris M. Lessing & Doris Lessing

Love, Again tells the story of a 65-year-old woman who falls in love and struggles to maintain her sanity. Widowed for many years, with grown children, Sarah is a writer who works in the theater in London. During...

African Laughter

by Doris Lessing

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 Review

The Cleft

by Doris Lessing

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 the last years of...

Alfred and Emily

by Doris Lessing

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...

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

by Doris Lessing

The celebrated author explores new ways to view ourselves and the society we live in, and gives us fresh answers to such enduring questions as how to think for ourselves and understand what we know.

Grass Is Singing

by Doris Lessing

Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and a beautifully understated social critique. Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent...

The Good Terrorist

by Doris Lessing

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,...

The Summer Before the Dark

by Doris Lessing

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...

Shikasta: Re, Colonised Planet 5

by Doris Lessing

This is the first volume in the series of novels Doris Lessing calls collectively Canopus in Argos: Archives. Presented as a compilation of documents, reports, letters, speeches and journal entries, this purports...