Most Popular Books by Doris Lessing

Nobel laureate Doris Lessing''s classic novel of the pivotal summer in one woman''s life is a brilliant excursion into the terrifying gulf between youth and old age. As the summer begins, Kate Brown—attractive, intelligent, forty-five, happily married, with a house in the London suburbs and three grown children—has no reason to expect that anything will change. But by summer''s end the woman she was—living behind a protective camouflage of feminine charm and caring—no longer exists. The Summer Before the Dark takes us along on Kate''s 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 herself that lets her finally and truly come of age.

This murder story features a Rhodesian farmer''s wife and her houseboy.

“[Lessing] is a pro, writing at the top of her powers, realistically, passionately, accessibly…. a stirring novel”—San Francisco Chronicle Frances 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 what is being tolerated? Comrade Johnny delivers political tirades, then laps up the adolescent adulation before disappearing into the night to evade the clutches of his responsibilities. Johnny’s mother funds all but finds she can embrace only one lost little girl—Sylvia, who leaves for a South African village dying of AIDS. These are the people dreaming the Sixties into being and who, on the morning after, woke to find they were the ones taxed with cleaning up and making good.

In her visionary novel Mara and Dann (published in 1999), Doris Lessing introduced us to a brother and sister battling through a future landscape where the climate is much changed -- colder than ever before in the north and unbearably dry and hot in the south. In this new novel the odyssey continues. Dann is grown up now, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization, traveling with his friend, a snow dog who brings him back from the depths of despair. And we meet Mara''s daughter and Griot with the green eyes, an abandoned child-soldier who, in this strange and captivating adventure, discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories. Like its predecessor, this brilliant new novel from one of our greatest living writers explains as much about the world we now live in as it does about the future we may be heading toward.

From To Room Nineteen, a study of a controlled middle class marriage grounded in intelligence, to the shocking A Woman on the Roof, where a workman becomes obsessed with a pretty sunbather, this collection of stories bears witness to Doris Lessing''s perspective on the human condition.

A middle class Englishwoman joins a loose-knit group of political vagabonds and finds herself drawn into a situation she never intended.

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.

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 year. 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 reviles part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

Across eighteen short stories, Lessing dissects London and its inhabitants with the power for truth and compassion to be expected of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. ''During that first year in England, I had a vision of London I cannot recall now ... it was a nightmare city that I lived in for a year. Then, one evening, walking across the park, the light welded buildings, trees and scarlet buses into something familiar and beautiful, and I knew myself to be at home.'' Lessing''s vision of London - a place of nightmares and wonder - underpins this brilliantly multifaceted collection of stories about the city, seen from a cafe table, a hospital bed, the back seat of a taxi, a hospital casualty department; seen, as always, unflinchingly, and compellingly depicted.

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.

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.

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 years of his life, a Roman senator retells the history of human creation and reveals the little-known story of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic coastal wilderness. The Clefts have neither need nor knowledge of men; childbirth is controlled through the cycles of the moon, and they bear only female children. But with the unheralded birth of a strange new child—a boy—the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy.

The grande dame of English literature returns with a stunning collection of four short, intensely observed novels.

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 the production of a play, she falls in love with a seductive young actor, the beautiful and androgynous 28-year-old Bill, and then with the more mature 35-year-old director Henry. Finding herself in a state of longing and desire that she had thought was the province of younger women, Sarah is compelled to explore and examine her own personal history of love, from her earliest childhood desires to her most recent obsessions. The result is a brilliant anatomy of love from a master of human psychology who remains one of the most daring writers of fiction at work today.

"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 The Children of Violence series, a quintet of novels tracing the life of Martha Quest, from her childhood in Africa to a post-nuclear Britain of AD 2000, first established Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, as a great radical writer. In this, the fifth and final volume, Marth, now middle-aged, leaves Africa for post-war London. As housekeeper to the Coldridge family, she watches the children in her care, the new ''children of violence'', grow up in a disintegrating world, a world careering toward nuclear disaster.

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.