Best Selling Books by Doris Lessing

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.

Dorris Lessing'' s classic series of autobiographical novels is the fictional counterpart to Under My Skin. In these five novels, first published in the 1950'' s and 60s, Doris Lessing transformed her fascinating life into fiction, creating her most complex and compelling character, Martha Quest.

''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.

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 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.

Portrays the helpless collisions and alienations of the races in South Africa.

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

"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.

Relates the story of the education of a woman, Ambien II, who is one of the extremely long-lived administrators of the Sirian Empire.

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

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.

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.

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.

In this collection of stories, which spans four decades, Doris Lessing''s unique gift for observation, her wit, her compassion and remarkable ability to illuminate the complexities of human life are all displayed.

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

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.

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.

Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in her most involving, most personal, most political novel for some years

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.

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.