Most Popular Books by Doris Lessing

Martha Quest is a passionate and intelligent young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood to marriage. She is a romantic idealist in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion, and instinct bared to experience. For her, this is a time of solidarity reading, daydreams, dancing--and the first disturbing encounters with sex. Martha Quest is the first novel in Doris Lessing''s classic Children of Violence sequence of novels, each a masterpiece in its own right, and, taken together, an incisive, all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

The only collection of literary essays and criticism by one of the most distinguished writers of our time Toward the end of his long life, Goethe said that he had only just learned how to read. In this collection of the very best of Doris Lessing''s essays -- never before published in book form -- we are treated to the wisdom and keen insight of a writer who has herself learned, over the course of a brilliant career spanning more than half a century, 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. This is a book about books and writers -- Stendhal and Muriel Spark, Pride and Prejudice, de Beauvoir and Ecclesiastes, Virginia Woolf -- but in its breadth and precision, Time Bites is also a map of the human spirit, of our hopes, fears, and basic needs; and on a more personal level, a map of the wonderful, searching mind of one of our greatest living writers.

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

This story of a family, spanning most of the twentieth century, has its fulcrum in the Sixties, that contradictory and embattled decade about which argument becomes louder each day. The youth of that time, bursting old bonds and demanding freedoms, were seen by some of their elders in a manner not at all as they saw themselves, as romantic idealists, but as deeply damaged people. Old Julia, the clan''s matriarch, knows why. "You can''t have two dreadful wars and then say ''That''s it, and now everything will go back to normal.'' They''re screwed up, our children, they are the children of war." Remarkable women, Julia and Frances, grandmother and mother, fight for "the kids" against obstacles, the worst being Comrade Johnny. Here is a memorable picture of a character only recently departed from our scene. "The revolution comes before personal matters" is his dictum, as he deposits discarded wives and hurt children in the accommodating house whose emotional center is always the extendable kitchen table, that essential prop of the Sixties, around which the family sits through the evenings, eating, joking, boasting about their shoplifting, debating the violent ideologies of the time that take some of them out to the Third World, another to a South African village dying of AIDS. This novel reflects our recent history like a many-faceted mirror, and is full of people not easily forgotten, each -- for worse or for better, directly or indirectly -- made by war.

"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.

"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.

The fifth book in the Children of Violence series, a quintet of novels tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa through to old age in a post-nuclear Britain. The other books are Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm and Landlocked.

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.

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.

In a series of captivating, interconnected vignettes, Lessing writes about the cats that have slinked, bullied, and charmed their way into her life. Their exploits, rivalries, terrors, affections, ancient features, and learned behaviors are recounted with vivid simplicity in this humorous, entertaining look at the world of cats. 10 watercolors.

"Planet 8, a prosperous world with intelligent, vital inhabitants, is transformed by an Ice Age, a change that causes a critical variation in lifestyle and a drastic reappraisal of the meaning and value of life." --

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

An interplanetary agent on leave from service on Earth (Shikasta) reports to his superior from an Earth-like planet called Volyen.

A fascinating look inside the mind of a man who is supposedly “mad.” Professor Charles Watkins of Cambridge University is a patient at a mental hospital where the doctors try with increasing drugs to bring his mind under control. But Watkins has embarked on a tremendous psychological adventure where, after spinning endlessly on a raft in the Atlantic, he lands on a tropical island inhabited by strange creatures with strange customs. Later, he is carried off on a cosmic journey into space…

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the first instalment in the visionary novel cycle ''Canopus in Argos: Archives''. The story of the final days of our planet is told through the reports of Johor, an emissary sent from Canopus. Earth, now named Shikasta (the Stricken) by the kindly, paternalistic Canopeans who colonised it many centuries ago, is under the influence of the evil empire of Puttiora. War, famine, disease and environmental disasters ravage the planet. To Johor, mankind is a ''totally crazed species'', racing towards annihilation: his orders to save humanity set him what seems to be an impossible task. Blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing''s astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of our own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic self-destruction.

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.