Best Selling Books by Doris Lessing

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.

Like the author''s Canopus in Argos novels, this graphic novel is an exercise in speculative imagination. It marks a venture into new creative territory for Lessing, and is illustrated by the young British artist Daniel Vallely.

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.

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 a failing marriage. Finally, she must make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security. "A Proper Marriage" is the second novel in Doris Lessing'' s classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece on its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

''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.

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

An account of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

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.

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.

Science fiction. Doris Lessing''s celebrated space fiction set in an extraordinary cosmos where the fate of the Earth is influenced by the rivalries and interactions of three powerful galactic empires.

This is a collection of stories about Africa which evoke the people and continent, drawn from the author''s experiences as a child in Southern Rhodesia.

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.

A rich and penetrating portrait of Lessing''s homeland, African Laughter recounts the visits she made to Zimbabwe in 1982, 1988, 1989, and 1992, afte r being exiled from the old Southern Rhodesia for 25 years for her opposition to the minority white government. In an original work, Lessing uses memory and reminiscence with recent experience to depict a country in the process of change.

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the fifth and final instalment in the visionary novel cycle ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’.

Doris Lessing, one of England''s finest living novelists, invites us to imagine a mythical society free from sexual intrigue, free from jealousy, free from petty rivalries: a society free from men.

In a beleaguered city where rats and roving gangs terrorize the streets, where government has broken down and meaningless violence holds sway, a woman -- middle-aged and middle-class -- is brought a twelve-year-old girl and told that it is her responsibility to raise the child. This book, which the author has called "an attempt at autobiography," is that woman''s journal -- a glimpse of a future only slightly more horrendous than our present, and of the forces that alone can save us from total destruction.

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

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.