New Release Books by Doris Lessing

This is Doris Lessing s Africa where she lived for twenty-five years and where so much of her interest and concern still resides. Here in these stories, Lessing explores the complexities, the agonies and joys, and the textures of life in Africa.

The companion to a series of lectures given by Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in which she addresses some of the most important questions facing us today.

“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 Times Shocking, 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 since childhood. But their bond stretches beyond familiar bounds when these middle-aged mothers fall in love with each other''s teenage sons—taboo-shattering passions that last for years, until the women end them, vowing to have a respectable old age.

This collection of four novellas includes ‘The Grandmothers’, on which ‘Adoration’, a major film starring Naomi Watts and Robin Wright, is based. (Please note, this collection was previously published as ‘The Grandmothers’.)

"The Golden Notebook is Doris Lessing''s most important work and has left its mark upon the ideas and feelings of a whole generation of women." — New York Times Book Review Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. Lessing''s best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

"There is passion here, a piercing accuracy, a rare sensitivity and power. . . . One can only marvel." — New York Times Set 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 woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm works its slow poison. Mary''s despair progresses until the fateful arrival of Moses, an enigmatic black servant. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses—master and slave—are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion, until their psychic tension explodes with devastating consequences.

Nobel Prize for Literature winner Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in one of her most involving, personal, political novels.

The second volume of the autobiography of Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing, a distinctive science fiction short story.

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.

The story of a middle-aged woman’s search for freedom, from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing, a short story about a young boy’s coming of age.

Four novellas by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, that once again show her to be unequalled in her ability to capture the truth of the human condition.

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.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing, a short story about a young girl’s experience of growing up in an unnamed African country.

Three acclaimed works for the stage by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a collection of some of her finest short stories.

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 young wife, lonely and trapped in the African bush, until she turns to Moses, the black cook, for kindness and understanding. A landmark of 20th-century literature, ''The Golden Notebook'' is a powerful account of Anna Wulf, a woman searching for her personal and political identity, recording her emotional and creative lives in notebooks of different colours. And in ''The Good Terrorist'', a group of naive revolutionaries sets out to change the world, only to find themselves involved in a protest movement of escalating violence.

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 baby. Gruesomely goblin-like in appearance, insatiably hungry, abnormally strong and violent, Ben has nothing innocent or infant-like about him. As he grows older and more terrifying, Harriet finds she cannot love him, David cannot bring himself to touch him, and their four older children are afraid of him. Understanding that he will never be accepted anywhere, Harriet and David are torn between their instincts as parents and their shocked reaction to this fierce and unlovable child whose existence shatters their belief in a benign world.

A fascinating novel of love and ecology from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A powerful contemporary novel about a group of would-be terrorists in London that Susan Brownmiller in Newsday called "a bone-tingling narrative that should stand as the crowning achievement of Lessing''s distinguished career".

"Doris Lessing has a powerful voice and a particular one. It speaks in anger at the distortion of personal relations ion a unsound society, but speaks it with a wit that manages to be both pitiless and compassionate." — Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times 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 pieces are set in contemporary London, a city the author loves for its variety, its diversity, the way it connects the life of animals and birds in the parks to the streets. Lessing''s fiction also explores the darker corners of relationships between women and men, as in the rich and emotionally complex title story, in which she uncovers a more parlous reality behind the façade of the most conventional relationship between the sexes.

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the second instalment in the visionary novel cycle ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’.

"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 Kingsolver 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 in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion, and instinct laid bare to experience. For her, this is a time of solitary reading daydreams, dancing — and the first disturbing encounters with sex. The first of Doris Lessing''s timeless Children of Violence novels, Martha Quest is an endearing masterpiece.

"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 middle of the night. Raised as outsiders in a poor rural village, Mara and Dann learn to survive the hardships and dangers of a life threatened as much by an unforgiving climate and menacing animals as by a hostile community of Rock People. Eventually they join the great human migration North, away from the drought that is turning the southern land to dust, and in search of a place with enough water and food to support human life. Traveling across the continent, the siblings enter cities rife with crime, power struggles, and corruption, learning as much about human nature as about how societies function. With a clear-eyed vision of the human condition, Mara and Dann is imaginative fiction at its best.

Far from resting on her laurels, Lessing goes from strength to strength. Ben''s half-human ignorance, paranoia, and rage are magnificently imagined and vividly present on every page. The condition of the outsider has hardly ever before in fiction been portrayed with such raw power and righteous anger. Few, if any, living writers can have explored so many forbidding fictional worlds with such passion and conviction. — Kirkus Reviews The poignant and tragic sequel to Doris Lessing''s bestselling novel, THE FIFTH CHILD. 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 and the mountains of the Andes. Ben is tossed about in a tumultuous search for his people, a reason for his being. How the world receives him, and, he fares in it will horrify and captivate until the novel''s dramatic finale.

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 charmed their way into Doris Lessing''s life. She tells their stories—their exploits, rivalries, terrors, affections, ancient gestures, and learned behaviors—with vivid simplicity. And she tells the story of herself in relation to cats: the way animals affect her and she them, and the communication that grows possible between them—a language of gesture and mood and desire as eloquent as the spoken word. No other writer conveys so truthfully the real interdependence of humans and cats or convinces us with such stunning recognition of the reasons why cats really matter.

In this ambitious novel of madness and release, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Doris Lessing imagines the fantastical "inner-space" life of an amnesiac.Charles Watkins, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, has suffered a breakdown, confined to a mental hospital as his friends and doctors attempt to bring him back to reality. But Watkins has embarked on a tremendous pyschological adventure that takes him from a spinning raft in the Atlantic to a ruined stone city on a tropical island to an outer-space journey through singing planets. As he travels in his mind through memory and the farther reaches of imagination, his doctors try to subdue him with ever more powerful drugs in a competition for his soul. In this provocative novel, Lessing takes us on a harrowing voyage into the rarely glimpsed territory of the inner mind.

The first volume of Doris Lessing’s ‘Collected African Stories’, and a classic work from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.