Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing, 2007

Widely regarded as one of the most influential books of the mid-20th century and the central masterpiece of Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook is the story of Anna Wulf, a young novelist with writer's block. Divorced, with a young child, and disillusioned by unsatisfactory relationships, she feels her life is falling apart. Fearing the onset of madness, she records her experiences in four colored notebooks. Bold and illuminating, fusing sex, politics, madness and motherhood, it is at once a wry and perceptive portrait of the intellectual and moral climate of the 1950s, on the brink of feminism, and a powerful account of a woman searching for her own personal and political identity. Подробнее

Alfred and Emily

Doris Lessing, 2008

»I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me», writes Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing in this combined novella and memoir exploring the lives of her parents, each irrevocably damaged by the Great War. In the fictional first half of Alfred and Emily, she 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. What follows is Lessing's piercing examination of their relationship as it actually was through the Great War and the family's move to Africa — and the impact her parents' marriage had on her, a young woman growing up in a strange land. «In her first major work since receiving the Nobel Prize, Lessing looks back to the enduring mysteries of her parents' lives. 'The First World War did them both in', she writes. Her father lost a leg and was tormented by untreated post-traumatic stress syndrome. Her mother never got over the suffering of the countless soldiers she nursed in London, or her husband's misery, made worse by the severe diabetes that shortened his life. Haunted by her parents' sacrifices, Lessing imagines alternative lives for Alfred and Emily in a sparkling novella. Laced with the subtlest of observations and the wryest of wit, it's a charming yet cutting story of rapid social change, the resiliency of women, class conflicts, the call to do good, and the confounding dynamics of marriage and parenthood. Lessing then switches to memoir to disclose true-life inspirations for the novella, sharing bristling tales of her family's precarious existence in British colonial Africa and musing over her resourceful mother's kitchen clinic and her contemplative father's fascination with spiders and stars. This unusual marriage of fiction and memoir (and family photographs) results in a book at once spellbinding, rueful, and tragic. And how keenly Lessing decries injustice, wastefulness, and war; how much of her parents' smashed dreams and root-deep sorrows she still harbors». Подробнее

Великие мечты

Дорис Лессинг, 2009

Роман «Великие мечты» представляет собой эпохальное полотно, рассказывающее о жизни трех поколений англичан. Автор затрагивает множество проблем: положение женщин в современном мире, национально-освободительное движение в Африке, борьба со СПИДом. Великие мечты, будь то победа коммунизма на всей планете или создание вакцины от смертельной болезни, зачастую остаются всего лишь красивыми иллюзиями, но человек, у которого есть Мечта, чувствует, что прожил жизнь не зря. Подробнее

Hunger nach dem großen Leben

Doris Lessing, 2002

»Hunger nach dem großen Leben» ist ein Stück afrikanischer Geschichte. Was sonst als weltpolitische Schlagzeile aus der dritten Welt zu uns kommt, wird hier konkret, sinnfällig und eindringlich am Schicksal eines afrikanischen Jungen erfahrbar: die Übermacht der aufgesetzten kolonialen Zivilisation, errichtet auf den Trümmern zerstörter, jahrtausendealter dörflicher Gemeinschaft und Kultur. Подробнее

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Doris Lessing, 2002

An extraordinary blend of fantasy and realism, this is classic Lessing. Penniless, rambling and incoherent, a man is found wandering at night on London’s Embankment. Taken to hospital and heavily sedated, he tells the doctors of his incredible fantastical voyage, adrift on the ocean, landing on unknown shores, flying on the back of a huge white bird. Identified as Charles Walker, a Cambridge Classics professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing clues to the nature of his breakdown: both his young wife, Felicity, and his mistress, Constance, have been troubled by his cold detachment; his fellow dons are bewildered by Watkins’s recent anti-social outburst and anarchistic theories on the futility of education. As the doctors try to cure him, Watkins begins a fierce battle to hold on to his magnificent inner world, as it gradually acquires a greater reality than the everyday… An extraordinary blend of fantasy and realism, ‘Briefing for a Descent into Hell’ is one of Doris Lessing’s most brilliantly achieved novels; it links her early work, which explored the nature of subjectivity, with her later experiments in science fiction. Its stunning indictment of the tyranny of society – one of the perennial themes of Lessing’s writing – is powerful, disturbing and, as always, magnificently rendered. Подробнее

Mara and Dann

Doris Lessing, 2000

A visionary novel from Doris Lessing, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. It is sooner than you might think. And the earth’s climate is much changed – it’s colder than ever before in the north, and unbearably dry and hot in the south. Mara, who is seven, and her four-year-old brother Dann find themselves somewhere very strange, not home… They are taken in by a kindly, grandmotherly woman, but this new life is hard: hunger, dirt, thirst and danger are the children’s constant companions. Drought and fire carry off their adoptive home and force them to set off northward into the unknown, to experience a series of adventures that bring them through to an altogether altered world, where they can start to learn and build anew. Doris Lessing has written a compelling, troubling and entertaining novel that, through the remarkable odyssey of a brother and sister living in the imagined future, manages to tell us a great deal about the present we only dimly perceive and scarcely know how to value. Подробнее

Ben, in the World

Doris Lessing, 2001

A sequel to one of Lessing’s most celebrated novels, ‘The Fifth Child’. 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 his childhood and takes our primal, misunderstood, maladjusted teenager out into the world, where again he meets mostly with mockery, fear and incomprehension but with just enough kindness and openness to keep him afloat as his adventures take him from London to the south of France and on to South America in his restless quest for community, companionship and peace. Doris Lessing, in this book, employs a plain, unadorned prose fit for fables; again, we have a childlike perspective at the heart of the book; again, the world in all its malevolence and misapprehenison swirls around at the edge, while, occasionally, a strong character steps forward to try to stake out some values and practise some good behaviour. Подробнее

The Sweetest Dream

Doris Lessing, 2002

Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in one of her most involving, most personal, most political novels. It’s the morning of the 1960s and it’s suppertime at Freedom Hall, the most welcoming household in North London. Frances Lennox stands at her stove, bringing another feast to readiness before ladling it out to the youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table – here are her two sons, smarting at their upbringing but beginning to absorb their mother’s lessons. Around them are ranged their schoolfriends and girlfriends and ex-friends and new friends fresh off the street. The feast begins. Wine and talk flow. Everything is being changed and being challenged. But what is being tolerated? And where will it end? Over there in the corner is Frances’ ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, who delivers his rousing tirades, then laps up the adolescent adulation before disappearing into the night to evade the clutches of his responsibilities. Upstairs sits Johnny’s exiled mother, funding all, but finding she can embrace only one lost little girl – Sylvia, who has to travel to Africa, to newly independent Zimlia, to find out who she is and what she wants. And, yes, what of the Africans, what will they tolerate? These are the people dreaming the 1960s into being and the people who on the morning after all that dreaming, woke to find they were the ones taxed with clearing up and making good. Подробнее

The Diaries of Jane Somers

Doris Lessing, 2002

First published by Michael Joseph 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. Подробнее

To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories)

Doris Lessing, 2002

From the Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007, a collection of some of her finest short stories. 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, controlled middle-class marriage ‘grounded in intelligence’, to the shocking ‘A Woman on the Roof’, where a workman becomes obsessed with a pretty sunbather, this superb collection of stories written over four decades, from the 1950s to the 1990s bears stunning witness to Doris Lessing’s perspective on the human condition. Подробнее

The Grandmothers

Doris Lessing, 2004

With the four short novels in this collection, Doris Lessing once again proves that she is unequalled in her ability to capture the truth of the human condition. The title story, ‘The Grandmothers’, is an astonishing tour de force, a shockingly intimate portrait of an unconventional extended family and the lengths to which they will go to find happiness and love. Written with a keen cinematic eye, the story is a ruthless dissection of the veneer of middle-class morality and convention which manages to be at once universal and desperately, heartbreakingly personal. A second story, ‘Victoria and the Staveneys’, takes us through 20 years of the life of a young underprivilged black girl in London. A chance meeting introduces her to the world of the Staveneys – a liberal white middle-class family – and, seduced, she falls pregnant by one of the sons. As her young daughter grows up, Victoria feels her parental control diminishing as the attractions of the Staveney’s world exert themselves. An honest and often uncomfortable look at race relations in London over the past few decades, Lessing reaffirms her brilliance at demonstrating the effect of society on the individual. With these and two other equally brilliant novellas, Lessing has proven Подробнее

Time Bites

Doris Lessing, 2005

Assembled here for the first time in book form are the very best of several decades' worth of occasional writings from perhaps the best-loved and most-admired of Britain's great female writers. A selection of the very best of Doris Lessing's essays, never before collected together and published in book form. Articles on writers as diverse as Jane Austen, Muriel Spark, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Mikael Bulgakov sit alongside autobiographical looks at the beliefs that have shaped Lessing's thinking. There are adoring and adorable pieces on the beloved cats that she has allowed to share her life, and insightful looks at the Africa in which she grew up, and London and England, the place where she made her home. The range of subjects, cultures and periods within these essays is huge but the collection is utterly consistent in one key regard: Doris Lessing's clear-eyed vision and clearly-expressed prose are present throughout. There is a huge amount of wisdom and entertainment in these pages, and fans of Doris' infectiously forthright, zestful and impish spirit will love to own and read this book. Подробнее

The Cleft

Doris Lessing, 2008

Doris Lessing, one of England's finest living novelists, invites us to imagine a mythical society free from sexual intrigue, free from jealousy, free from petty rivalries: a society free from men. An old Roman senator, contemplative at his late stage of life, embarks on what will likely be his last endeavour: the retelling of the story of human creation. He recounts the history of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic, coastal wilderness, confined within the valley of an overshadowing mountain. The Clefts have no need, or knowledge, of men – childbirth is controlled, like the tides that lap around their feet, through the cycles of the moon, and their children are always female. But with the unheralded birth of a strange, new child – a boy – the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy. At first, in their ignorance, the Clefts are awestruck by this seemingly malformed child, but as more and more of these threateningly unfamiliar males appear, now unfavourably nicknamed Squirts, they are rejected, and are exposed on the nearby mountainside; sacrificed to the patrolling eagles overhead, the sentinels of their female haven. Unbeknownst to the Clefts, however, these baby males survive, aided by the very eagles sent to kill them, and thrive on their own on the other side of the mountain. It is not until an unusually curious young Cleft named Maire goes beyond the geographical, and emotional, divide of the mountain that this disquieting fact is uncovered – a discovery that forces the Clefts to accept and realign themselves to the prospect of a now shared world, and the possible vengeance of the wronged males. In this fascinating and beguiling novel, Lessing confronts head-on the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women, two similar and yet thoroughly distinct creatures, manage to live side by side in the world, and how the specifics of gender affect every aspect of our existence. Подробнее

The Good Terrorist

Doris Lessing, 2009

A hugely significant political novel for the late twentieth-century from one of the outstanding writers of the modern era and Winner of the Nobel Prize for Fiction 2007. In a London squat a band of bourgeois revolutionaries are united by a loathing of the waste and cruelty they see around them. These maladjusted malcontents try desperately to become involved in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence. Only Alice seems capable of organising anything. Motherly, practical and determined, she is also easily exploited by the group and ideal fodder for a more dangerous and potent cause. Eventually their naïve radical fantasies turn into a chaos of real destruction, but the aftermath is not as exciting as they had hoped. Nonetheless, while they may not have changed the world, their lives will never be the same again… Подробнее

The Fifth Child

Doris Lessing, 2001

A classic tale from Doris Lessing, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007, of a family torn apart by the arrival of Ben, their feral fifth child. 'Listening to the laughter, the sounds of children playing, Harriet and David would reach for each other's hand, and smile, and breathe happiness'. Four children, a beautiful old house, the love of relatives and friends, Harriet and David Lovatt's life is a glorious hymn to domestic bliss and old-fashioned family values. But when their fifth child is born, a sickly and implacable shadow is cast over this tender idyll. Large and ugly, violent and uncontrollable, the infant Ben, 'full of cold dislike', tears at Harriet's breast. Struggling to care for her new-born child, faced with a darkness and a strange defiance she has never known before, Harriet is deeply afraid of what, exactly, she has brought into the world! Подробнее

Martha Quest

Doris Lessing, 1996

The first book in the «Children of Violence» series, a quintet of novels tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa through to old age in a post-nuclear Britain. The other novels are «A Proper Marriage», «A Ripple from the Storm», «Landlocked» and «The Four-Gated City». Подробнее

Love, Again

Doris Lessing, 1997

A fierce, compelling account of the nature and origins of love from Doris Lessing, one of the most acclaimed authors of the twentieth-century and Winner of the Nobel Pize for Literature 2007. Sarah Durham, sixty-year-old producer and founder of a leading fringe theatre company, commissions a play based on the journals of Julie Vairon, a beautiful, wayward nineteenth-century mulatto woman. It captivates all who come into contact with it, and dramatically changes the lives of all those who take part in it. For Sarah the changes are profound — she falls in love with two younger men causing her to relive her own stages of growing up, from immature, infantile with the beautifual and androgynous Bill, to the mature love, Henry. Подробнее

Doris Lessing

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