A highly personal story of the eminent British writer returning to her African roots that is "brilliant . . . [and] captures the contradictions of a young country."-- New York Times Book Review

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 une...

In her 1985 CBC Massey Lectures Doris Lessing addresses the question of personal freedom and individual responsibility in a world increasingly prone to political rhetoric, mass emotions, and inherited structures of unquestioned belief. The Nobel...

In the last years of his life, a contemplative Roman senator embarks on one last epic endeavor: 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 wi...

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 commun...

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 snobbe...

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-five stor...

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 author loves for ...

A fascinating look inside the mind of a man who is supposedly "mad." From the Paperback edition.

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 a...

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 of the pla...

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 w...

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. Be...

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 w...

Doris Lessing is unrivalled in her ability to capture the truth from the complexities of relationships and the stories in this wonderful collection have lost none of their original power. Two marriages, both middle class, liberal and 'rather liter...

For more than four decades, Doris Lessing's work has observed the passion and confusion of human relations, holding a mirror up to our selves in her unflinching dissection of the everyday. From the magnificent 'To Room Nineteen', a study of a dry,...

In the title novel, two friends fall in love with each other's teenage sons, and these passions last for years, until the women end them, vowing a respectable old age. In Victoria and the Staveneys , a young woman gives birth to a child of mixed...

Ancient tradition suggests that this world-weary lament is the work of Solomon in old age. Casting its eye over the transient nature of life, the book questions the striving for wisdom and the truth, choosing instead to espouse the value of living...

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 senator em...

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 author loves for ...