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.

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''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.

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.

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.

"She has revealed that brilliant kernel at the heart of it all that we recognize as the truth." — Francine Prose, Washington Post Book World Love, Again tells the story of a 65-year-old woman who falls in love and struggles to maintain her life as she knows it. 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.

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''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.

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 years. 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 relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. Doris Lessing''s best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

In a personal meditation on family, war, and memory, the author re-imagines the lives of her parents if World War I had not happened, and also relates the facts of their lives in the wake of the war''s devastation.

In an ancient society solely populated by women whose childbirth cycles are controlled by the moon, community harmony is thrown into jeopardy by the unheralded birth of a boy, whose existence brings into awareness the role of gender in virtually every aspect of daily life.

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.

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.

First published in 1984, under a pseudonym, as ''The Diary of a Good Neighbour'' and ''If the Old Could ...'', now published as ''The Diaries of Jane Somers'', this is in many ways classic Lessing. As resonant with social and political themes as ''The Golden Notebook'', 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. ''The Diary of Jane Somers'' 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 who is struggling with an emotional breakdown. 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

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.

Doris Lessing''s compelling new novel of a drought-plagued future takes readers inside the heart and soul of a truly memorable heroine--one whose struggle for survival cannot extinguish her passion for knowledge.

Doris Lessing joined the Communist Party in London, and here she explores the allure Communism held for artists, intellectuals, and social reformist idealists in the ''50s. A fascinating meditation on the psychological, sociological and historical roots of a generation''s behavior, Lessing offers insight into the ideological and political madness of the post-war era. Lessing also evokes the bohemian life she led in post-war London: her work in the theater, her romantic liaisons, her books, her single parenting and the tenor and texture of life in the ''50s. Among those who appear in these pages are Clancy Sigal, Nelson Algren, Henry Kissinger, Kenneth Tynan and Bertrand Russell, to name a few. She muses at length about the relationships between men and women, offering provocative insights into the attitudes of American men toward sex, women and love. The last section of the memoir describes the writing of her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook. It offers a fascinating account of the creative process by which a literary masterpiece is conceived and executed.

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.

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.