Doris Lessing
Author
Pub. Date
[2008]
Appears on list
Description
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 the book, Doris Lessing imagines the happier...
Author
Pub. Date
[2003]
Description
"Grandmothers" tells of two women, best of friends, who were each single mothers to their sons who were also best of friends, and the strange couplings and forces the women brought to bear on their sons and their families. "Victoria and the Staveneys" tells of an orphaned black woman who has a child by the son in a white liberal family and the love they have for her daughter that seems to exclude her. "The Reason For It" tells of a city that banned...
5) The cleft
Author
Pub. Date
[2007]
Description
"In the last years of his life, a contemplative old Roman senator embarks on what will likely be his last endeavour: to retell the history of human creation and reveal 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...
6) Martha Quest
Author
Series
Pub. Date
c2001
Description
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...
Author
Series
Fifth Child volume 1
Pub. Date
[1988]
Description
Amid the turbulent atmosphere of the late 1960s, Harriet and David Lovatt manage to keep their family safely detached from outside turmoil--until the birth of their fifth child, who is abnormally strong, demanding, even violent.
Author
Series
Fifth Child volume 2
Pub. Date
2001
Description
Many will recall the powerful impact The Fifth Child, Doris Lessing's 1988 novel, made on publication. Its account of idyllic marital and parental bliss irredeemably shattered by the arrival of the feral fifth child of the Lovatts made for unnerving and compulsive reading. That child, Ben, now grown to legal maturity, is the central character of this sequel, which picks up the fable at the end of the childhood where the first book ended and takes...
Author
Pub. Date
2008
Description
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 upbringing, her companions encounter unexpected challenges in their quest to incite social change against complacency and capitalism. With a nuanced sense of the intersections between the personal and the political, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing creates...
Author
Pub. Date
2008.
Appears on list
Description
Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is at once a chronicle of human disintegration, an understated social critique, and a depiction of the quiet horror of one woman's struggle against a ruthless fate. Mary Turner is a self-confident, 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. Mary's despair...
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