New Releases by Doris Lessing

''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 sensitivity and power ... One can only marvel'' - New York Times 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 selfconfident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little, the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary''s despair progresses until the fateful arrival of an enigmatic and virile black servant, Moses. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses - master and slave - are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion. The tension explodes in an electrifying scene that ends this disturbing tale of racial strife in colonial South Africa. The Grass is Singing blends Lessing''s imaginative vision with her own vividly remembered early childhood to recreate the quiet horror of a woman''s struggle against a ruthless fate.

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.

« Je crois que la colère ramenée des tranchées par mon père s’est emparée de moi très tôt et ne m’a plus jamais quittée. Les enfants ressentent-ils les émotions de leurs parents ? La réponse est oui, nous les ressentons. Et voilà un héritage dont je me serais bien passée. À quoi bon tout cela ? C’est comme si cette vieille guerre imprégnait ma mémoire, ma conscience. »Doris Lessing, prix Nobel de littérature, explore la vie de ses parents, tous deux abîmés de manière irrévocable par la Grande Guerre. Elle imagine tout d’abord la vie plus heureuse qu’ils auraient pu bâtir si la guerre n’avait pas eu lieu, avant de se livrer à un examen cinglant de leur couple tel qu’il fut en réalité dans l’ombre pesante de cette guerre.« Aujourd’hui encore, je m’efforce d’échapper à cet héritage monstrueux, pour être enfin libre », confie Doris Lessing. Avec Alfred et Emily, c’est très exactement ce qu’elle fait, et de manière éclatante.

A fierce, compelling account of the nature and origins of love from Doris Lessing, one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century and winner of the Nobel Pize for Literature 2007.

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 when the summer ends, the woman she was -- living behind a protective camouflage of feminine charm and caring -- no longer exists. This novel. Doris Lessing''s brilliant excursion into the terrifying stretch of time between youth and old age, is her journey: from London to Turkey to Spain, from husband to lover to madness: on the road to a frightening new independence and a confrontation with self that lets her, finally, come truly of age.

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.

The first volume in the Canopus in Argos: Archives series is presented as a compilation of documents, reports, letters, speeches and journal entries, and purports to be a general study of the planet Shikasta–clearly the planet Earth–to be used by history students of the higher planet Canopus and to be stored in the Canopian archives. For eons, galactic empires have struggled against one another, and Shikasta is one of the main battlegrounds. Johar, an emissary from Canopus and the primary contributor to the archives, visits Shikasta over the millennia from the time of the giants and the biblical great flood up to the present. With every visit he tries to distract Shikastans from the evil influences of the planet Shammat but notes with dismay the ever-growing chaos and destruction of Shikasta as its people hurl themselves towards World War III and annihilation.

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 Martha Quest''s personal and political adventures in race-torn British Africa, following Martha through World War II, a grotesque second marriage, and an excursion into Communism. This wise and starling novel perceptively reveals the paradoxes, passions, and ironies rooted in the life of twentieth-century Anglo-Africa. A Ripple from the Storm is the third novel in Doris Lessing''s classic Children of Violence sequence of novels, each a masterpiece in its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

"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 Chronicle 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 you''ve probably never met or even read about--though they are the real English. The cast of characters — if that term can be applied to real people — includes: Bobby Brent, a con man; Mrs. Skeffington, a genteel woman who bullies her small child and flings herself down two flights of stairs to avoid having another; and Miss Priest, a prostitute, who replies to Lessing''s question "Don''t you ever like sex?" with "If you''re going to talk dirty, I''m not interested." In swift, barbed style, in high, hard, farcical writing that is eruptively funny, Doris Lessing records the joys and terrors of everyday life. The truth of her perception shines through the pages of a work that is a brilliant piece of cultural interpretation, an intriguing memoir and a thoroughly engaging read.

“A generous and pleasurable collection. . . . Vibrant and illuminating, with quotable lines on every page. . . . [Lessing is] a superb essayist: lucid, wise, knowledgeable, and witty.”— Booklist 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, to read the world differently. From imagining the secret sex life of Tolstoy to the secrets of Sufism, from reviews of classic books to commentaries on world politics, these essays span an impressive range of subjects, cultures, periods, and themes, yet they are remarkably consistent in one key regard: Lessing’s clear-eyed vision and clearly-expressed prose. But in its breadth and precision Time Bites is more: it is also a map of the human spirit and an intimate diagram of the mind of one of our greatest living writers.

"Doris Lessing is the Cassandra of the documentary novel...crying for something harshly denied to our age: a longing for magic, for the irrational. Her concern for life, her independence of judgment and her gift for diagnosing our hydra-headed social ills is extraordinary." — The Observer 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. Determined to resist the erosion of her personality, she engages in the first satisfactory love affair and breaks free, if only momentarily, from her suffocating unhappiness. Landlocked is the fourth novel of Doris Lessing''s classic Children of Violence sequence of novels, each a masterpiece in its own right, and collectively an incisive, all encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

Shocking, intimate, often uncomfortably honest, these stories reaffirm Doris Lessing’s unequalled ability to capture the truth of the human condition In the title novel, two friends fall in love with each other''s teenage sons, and these passions last for years, until the women end them, vowing a respectable old age. In Victoria and the Staveneys, a young woman gives birth to a child of mixed race and struggles with feelings of estrangement as her daughter gets drawn into a world of white privilege. The Reason for It traces the birth, faltering, and decline of an ancient culture, with enlightening modern resonances. A Love Child features a World War II soldier who believes he has fathered a love child during a fleeting wartime romance and cannot be convinced otherwise.

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 is one of the most important writers of the past 100 years, a shrewd visionary. . . . Her new, short, haunting novel . . . succors us with . . . unforgettable visual images. We shiver and marvel as we lose ourselves in time.”— The Times (London) In her visionary novel Mara and Dann, Doris Lessing introduced a brother and sister battling through a future landscape defined by extreme climates in the north and south. In this new novel the odyssey continues. Dann is grown up, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization, traveling with his friend, a snow dog who saves him from the depths of despair. Here, too, are Mara’s daughter and Griot with the green eyes, an abandoned child-soldier who discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories. Like its predecessor, this brilliant novel from one of our greatest living writers explains as much about our world as it does about the future we may be heading toward.

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 farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother, Emily, spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital after her great love, a doctor, drowned in the Channel. In the fictional first half of Alfred and Emily, Doris Lessing imagines the happier lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war; a story that begins with their meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester. This is followed by a piercing examination of their relationship as it actually was in the shadow of the Great War, of the family''s move to Africa, and of the impact of her parents'' marriage on a young woman growing up in a strange land. "Here I still am," says Doris Lessing, "trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free." Triumphantly, with the publication of Alfred and Emily, she has done just that.

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.

In this sequel to Mara and Dann, Dann is grown up now, travelling with a trusty snow dog, and we meet Mara''s daughter and Griot, the abandoned child-soldier.

First published by Michael Joseph in 1984, under a pseudonym, as The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could... , The Diaries of Jane Somers have been out of print for some time. In many ways they are classic Lessing: as resonant with social and political themes as The Golden Notebook and with them, Lessing returns to the realism of her early fiction with the wisdom and experience of maturity. The diaries introduce us to Jane, an intelligent and beautiful magazine editor concerned with success, clothes and comfort . But her real inadequacy is highlighted when first her husband, then her mother, die from cancer and Jane feels strangely removed. In an attempt to fill this void, she befriends ninety-something Maudie, whose poverty and squalor contrast so radically with the glamour and luxury of the magazine world. The two gradually come to depend on each other - Maudie delighting Jane with tales of London in the 1920s and Jane trying to care for the rapidly deteriorating old woman. If The Old Could... contrasts the helplessness of the elderly with that of the young as Jane is forced to care for her nineteen-year-old drop-out niece Kate as she struggles with an emotional breakdown and Jane realises that she understands young people as little as she so recently did the old.

The sequel to the acclaimed novel The Fifth Child. Ben Lovatt never fits in. He seems awkward -- too big, too strong, inhumanly made. Those who do not understand him -- including his own mother -- want him locked up. But now he has come of age and finds himself alone in the South of France, in Brazil and in the mountains of the Andes, where at last he discovers where he has come from and who are his people.

Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in her most involving, most personal, most political novel for some years

Doris Lessing imagine la vie sur terre après qu''une interminable période de sécheresse aura décimé des populations entières, forçant les survivants à remonter vers le nord, là où se trouvent les dernières ressources en eau. Comment les hommes reconstruiront-ils le monde, quelles valeurs les animeront une fois qu''un bouleversement climatique planétaire aura fait table rase de notre civilisation technologique occidentale ? L''odyssée de Mara et Dann, deux enfants abandonnés puis pourchassés, qui vont connaître la faim, la soif, la violence, la trahison, mais aussi l''amour, l''initiation et la maturité, est un fantastique voyage dans le temps. C''est aussi l''histoire d''une quête qui passe par la Méditerranée et les mythes fondateurs de notre civilisation. Par le biais de cette fiction, Doris Lessing s''adresse aux hommes et aux femmes d''aujourd''hui soucieux de l''avenir de l''humanité. Et à tous les amateurs de romans d''aventure et d''imagination.

Here Doris Lessing recounts the cats that have moved and amused her, from her childhood home overrun with kittens, to the wrenching decline of El Magnifico, whose story unfolds in a new essay, appearing here for the first time.

A story from Doris Lessing about an awkwardly loveable old cat.

Follows on from Under my skin (26 I/S). Life from 1950 onwards of the renowned author.

Talvez poucas autobiografias modernas sejam tão reveladoras da mente de seu criador. DEbaixo da minha pele, que abrange os primeiros trinta anos de vida da escritora Doris Lessing, mostra uma mulher reta e inflexível desde o início, uma mulher que quebra regras, que luta contra as amarras que sua formação e seu ambiente tentaram lhe impor. AO recordar, ao refazer a vida por escrito, Doris Lessing mantém a disposição para o enfrentamento e interroga: "Haverá alguma coisa inerente em nós que nos predispõe para a dor e para as lembranças da dor, de tal forma que os dias ou até mesmo semanas de momentos agradáveis se mostram menos convidativos que a dor?".

The fifth and final volume in Doris Lessing''s visionary novel cycle Canopus in Argos: Archives. It is a mix of fable, futuristic fantasy and pseudo-documentary accounts of 20th-century history.

In these twenty-four interviews spanning several decades, Doris Lessing talks frankly to a variety of interviewers--among them Joyce Carol Oates and Studs Terkel--about such subjects as her early years in Rhodesia, her involvement in Marxism and Sufism, her views on feminism, and her own fiction, especially The golden notebook.

This is the first volume of Doris Lessing''s autobiography, beginning with her childhood in Africa, taking us through her marriages, the birth of her children, involvement in communist politics, and ending on her arrival in London in 1949w.