The experiences of two women provide the framework for an intense literary study of liberated womanhood, in a new edition--which includes an author biography and publication history--of a novel originally published in 1962. Original. ...

The narrator, unnamed, is a middle-aged woman living in a post-apocalyptic London. She is given a 12-year-old girl, Emily, to care for, and the novel chronicles their relationship, Emily’s growth into a woman, and how she eventu...

Harriet and David Levatt defy the chaotic, unconstrained 1960s with a closely-guarded, nurturing family environment. Into an already large family, which Harriet tends while David works, their fifth child is born. Ben, an ugly, violent...

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 resis...

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 self-confident, independent young woman who becomes...

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...

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...

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 have probably nev...

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 you...

The first in Lessings' Children of Violence series, MARTHA QUEST introduces Martha at age 15, chafing at the restraints of her bourgeois home and domineering mother. As soon as she is able, Martha leaves her rural home for the city, w...

This is the first volume in the series of novels Doris Lessing calls collectively Canopus in Argos: Archives. Presented as a compilation of documents, reports, letters, speeches and journal entries, this purports to be a general study...

This major collection contains all of Doris Lessing's short fiction, other than the stories set in Africa, from the beginning of her career until now. Set in London, Paris, the south of France, the English countryside, these thirty-fi...

Dann is now all grown up and is traveling with a snow dog, hunting for knowledge and grappling with despair, while Mara's daughter and Griot embark on a strange adventure, discovering that love and song can bring happiness, in the seq...

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 the last years of his life, a Roman sena...

The Good Terrorist' follows Alice Mellings, a woman who transforms her home into a headquarters for a group of radicals who plan to join the IRA. As Alice struggles to bridge her ideology and her bourgeois uringing, her companions enc...

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 piece are set in contemporary London, a city the autho...

'I was born with skins too few. Or they were scrubbed off me by...robust and efficient hands.' The experiences absorbed through these 'skins too few' are evoked in this memoir of Doris Lessing's childhood and youth as the daughter of...

The second volume of Doris Lessing's extraordinary autobiography covers the years 1949-62, from her arrival in war-weary London with her son, Peter, and the manuscript for her first novel, The Grass is Singing, under her arm to the p...