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.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing, a short story about a young boy’s coming of age.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing, a distinctive science fiction short story.

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the second volume of her collected short stories.

A visionary novel from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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 fierce, compelling account of the nature and origins of love from Doris Lessing, one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century and winner of the Nobel Pize for Literature 2007.

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.

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.

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.

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, she must make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security. A Proper Marriage is the second novel in Doris Lessing''s classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece on its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

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.

La vida no solo es lo que tenemos entre manos, sino lo que hubiera podido ser, pero son pocos los grandes autores que pueden cambiar el pasado con éxito, utilizando la escritura como herramienta vital. Doris Lessing ha querido rendir un homenaje a sus padres, imaginando qué hubiera sido de su vida si la Primera Guerra Mundial no hubiese truncado elporvenir de la joven pareja. El peso del conflicto fue como un castigo que planeó sobre la pequeña Doris desde su infancia, « Aquí estoy intentando escapar de esta monstruosa herencia, intentando ser libre », escribe la autora. Paraconseguirlo, en la primera parte del libro Lessing inventa para sus padres una vida donde no hubiera existido la guerra, y en la segunda cuenta cómo fue su vida en realidad, primero en Inglaterra y luego en África, intercalando en las páginas del texto unas viejas fotos familiares. « Si ahora pudiera conocer a Alfred y Emily sin la pesadilla de la guerra, creo que estarían contentos de la vida que he imaginado para ellos » , acaba diciendo Lessing en estas páginas. Ficción y autobiografía a la vez, acertada amalgama de imaginación y recuerdos, la novela más reciente de esta gran narradora demuestra una vez más el talento de una mujer que, a sus noventa años, sabe describir su propia vida como si de un cuento se tratara. Reseña: «Se supone que, llegados a cierta edad, dejamos de innovar, pero Doris Lessing es excepcional y nos sorprende una vez más.» The Guardian

"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 Intelligent, sensitive, and fiercely passionate, Martha Quest is a young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood. She is a romantic idealistic in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion, and instinct laid bare to experience. For her, this is a time of solitary reading daydreams, dancing — and the first disturbing encounters with sex. The first of Doris Lessing''s timeless Children of Violence novels, Martha Quest is an endearing masterpiece.

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 is one of the most important writers of the past 100 years, a shrewd visionary. . . . Her new, short, haunting novel . . . succors us with . . . unforgettable visual images. We shiver and marvel as we lose ourselves in time.”— The Times (London) In her visionary novel Mara and Dann, Doris Lessing introduced a brother and sister battling through a future landscape defined by extreme climates in the north and south. In this new novel the odyssey continues. Dann is grown up, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization, traveling with his friend, a snow dog who saves him from the depths of despair. Here, too, are Mara’s daughter and Griot with the green eyes, an abandoned child-soldier who discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories. Like its predecessor, this brilliant novel from one of our greatest living writers explains as much about our world as it does about the future we may be heading toward.

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.

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.

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.

Consisting of the celebrated story collections "Particularly Cats" and "Rufus the Survivor," and the memoir "The Old Age of El Magnifico," this book brilliantly evokes the subtleties of feline existence. An entertaining read for both cat and Lessing connoisseurs.--"The Observer."

Je crois que la colère ramenée des tranchées par mon père s''est emparée de moi très tôt et ne m''a plus jamais quittée. Les enfants ressentent-ils les émotions de leurs parents ? La réponse est oui, nous les ressentons. Et voilà un héritage dont je me serais bien passée. À quoi bon tout cela ? C''est comme si cette vieille guerre imprégnait ma mémoire, ma conscience. Doris Lessing, prix Nobel de littérature, explore la vie de ses parents, tous deux abîmés de manière irrévocable par la Grande Guerre. Elle imagine tout d''abord la vie plus heureuse qu''ils auraient pu bâtir si la guerre n''avait pas eu lieu, avant de se livrer à un examen cinglant de leur couple tel qu''il fut en réalité dans l''ombre pesante de cette guerre. Aujourd''hui encore, je m''efforce d''échapper à cet héritage monstrueux, pour être enfin libre , confie Doris Lessing. Avec Alfred et Emily, c''est très exactement ce qu''elle fait, et de manière éclatante.

The earth''s climate has changed - it is colder than ever before - and Dann is now a general, and the man to whom everyone looks for guidance and leadership. Lessing''s new novel charts his adventures across the frozen wastes of the north.

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.

En 1949 débarque à Londres une jeune femme, avec son enfant de deux ans et demi et le manuscrit d''un premier roman. Ayant rompu deux mariages successifs, sans argent, en révolte contre les préjugés et l''hypocrisie, elle va forger son destin de femme et d''écrivain. Dans ma peau, premier volume de l''autobiographie de Doris Lessing, évoquait son enfance rhodésienne, ses tribulations de jeune fille en rupture avec son milieu. De son arrivée à Londres à la publication du Carnet d''or (1962), qui l''imposera comme une romancière majeure, elle va vivre la bohème, connaître des amours tumultueuses, écrire passionnément, fréquenter les milieux du théâtre, se vouer à un idéal politique qui pourra la décevoir mais dont elle n''oublie pas la grandeur et la générosité. C''est un après-guerre en clair-obscur, marqué par le redressement économique, l''affrontement des super-puissances, une vie intellectuelle foisonnante, qui revit dans ces pages où Doris Lessing nous livre, avec sa sincérité coutumière, ses convictions sur l''amour, la littérature, l''argent, la société, la mémoire.

Doris Lessing imagine la vie sur terre après qu''une interminable période de sécheresse aura décimé des populations entières, forçant les survivants à remonter vers le nord, là où se trouvent les dernières ressources en eau. Comment les hommes reconstruiront-ils le monde, quelles valeurs les animeront une fois qu''un bouleversement climatique planétaire aura fait table rase de notre civilisation technologique occidentale ? L''odyssée de Mara et Dann, deux enfants abandonnés puis pourchassés, qui vont connaître la faim, la soif, la violence, la trahison, mais aussi l''amour, l''initiation et la maturité, est un fantastique voyage dans le temps. C''est aussi l''histoire d''une quête qui passe par la Méditerranée et les mythes fondateurs de notre civilisation. Par le biais de cette fiction, Doris Lessing s''adresse aux hommes et aux femmes d''aujourd''hui soucieux de l''avenir de l''humanité. Et à tous les amateurs de romans d''aventure et d''imagination.

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 publication of her most famous work of fiction, The Golden Notebook. She describes how communism dominated the intellectual life of the 1950s and how she, like nearly all communists, became disillusioned with extreme and rhetorical politics and left communism behind. Evoking the bohemian days of a young writer and single mother, Lessing speaks openly about her writing process, her friends and lovers, her involvement in the theater, and her political activities. Walking in the Shade is an invaluable social history as well as Doris Lessing''s Sentimental Education.

"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 a British colonial family in Persia and Southern Rhodesia Honestly and with overwhelming immediacy, Lessing maps the growth of her consciousness, her sexuality, and her politics, offering a rare opportunity to get under her skin and discover the forces that made her one of the most distinguished writers of our time.

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.