In victoria and the staveneys, a young woman gives birth to a child of mixed race and struggles with feelings of estrangement as her daughter gets drawn into a world of white privilege. The reason for it traces the birth, and decline of an ancient culture, faltering, with enlightening modern resonances.

A love child features a world war II soldier who believes he has fathered a love child during a fleeting wartime romance and cannot be convinced otherwise. Shocking, intimate, two friends fall in love with each other's teenage sons, until the women end them, often uncomfortably honest, these stories reaffirm Doris Lessing’s unequalled ability to capture the truth of the human condition In the title novel, and these passions last for years, vowing a respectable old age.

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The Summer Before the Dark Vintage International

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.

. As the summer begins, intelligent, kate brown -- attractive, happily enough married, forty five, 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.

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Prisons We Choose to Live Inside Cornelia & Michael Bessie Books

One of the most important writers of the past hundred years. The times londonin this perceptive collection of essays, how to understand what we know, Doris Lessing addresses directly the prime questions before us all: how to think for ourselves, how to pick a path in a world deluged with opinions and information, and how to look at our society and ourselves with fresh eyes.

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Grass Is Singing: A Novel

Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of Moses, an enigmatic, virile black servant. Locked in anguish, mary and moses—master and slave—are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion, until their psychic tension explodes with devastating consequences. There is passion here, a piercing accuracy, a rare sensitivity and power.

One can only marvel. New york timesset in southern rhodesia under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is at once a riveting chronicle of human disintegration, a beautifully understated social critique, and a brilliant 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 works its slow poison.

Adore: A Novella P.S.

Shocking, intimate, often uncomfortably honest, Adore reaffirms Doris Lessing’s unrivaled ability to capture the truth of the human conditionRoz and Lil have been best friends since childhood. But their bond stretches beyond familiar bounds when these middle-aged mothers fall in love with each other's teenage sons—taboo-shattering passions that last for years, until the women end them, vowing to have a respectable old age.

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Love Again: A Novel

Widowed for many years, with grown children, Sarah is a writer who works in the theater in London. During the production of a play, the beautiful and androgynous 28-year-old Bill, she falls in love with a seductive young actor, 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.

. Love, again tells the story of a 65-year-old woman who falls in love and struggles to maintain her sanity. 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.

The Golden Notebook: A Novel Perennial Classics

The golden notebook is doris lessing's most important work and has left its mark upon the ideas and feelings of a whole generation of women. New york times book reviewAnna 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. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. 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.

Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

Mara and Dann: Novel, A

With a clear-eyed vision of the human condition, Mara and Dann is imaginative fiction at its best. Traveling across the continent, and corruption, the siblings enter cities rife with crime, power struggles, learning as much about human nature as about how societies function. Thousands of years in the future, all the northern hemisphere is buried under the ice and snow of a new Ice Age.

Raised as outsiders in a poor rural village, Mara and Dann learn to survive the hardships and dangers of a life threatened as much by an unforgiving climate and menacing animals as by a hostile community of Rock People. At the southern end of a large landmass called Ifrik, seven-year old Mara and her younger brother, two children of the Mahondi people, Dann, are abducted from their home in the middle of the night.

Eventually they join the great human migration North, away from the drought that is turning the southern land to dust, and in search of a place with enough water and food to support human life.

Black Light: Stories

In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, the banality of self-loathing, the myth of marriage, the scourge of addiction, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood. Taking us from hot texas highways to cold family kitchens, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl—sharp-voiced, acerbic, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, and wise.

Longlisted for the national book award“the stories in black Light are grimy and weird, surprising, utterly lush. I loved every moment of this book. Carmen maria machado, author of her body and other PartiesWith raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows—those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look.

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The Fifth Child Vintage International

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. 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.

Gruesomely goblin-like in appearance, insatiably hungry, abnormally strong and violent, Ben has nothing innocent or infant-like about 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.

. 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.

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