Doris Lessing's Books

Through The Tunnel

By: Doris Lessing

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Through The Tunnel

By: Doris Lessing

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

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HarperCollins UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

0007525729

ISBN 13

9780007525720

In Pursuit of the English

By: Doris Lessing

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In the early post-war years, Doris Lessing left her native Southern Africa in search of a grail. But the English she pursued - and found - were living in working-class homes in East London. They were lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous and full-blooded - quite unlike what they were supposed to be.

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228

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HarperCollins Publishers

Published Date

ISBN 10

0006545165

ISBN 13

9780006545163

Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962 (Text Only)

By: Doris Lessing

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Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962 (Text Only)

By: Doris Lessing

The second volume of the autobiography of Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Page Count

388

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HarperCollins UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

000739649X

ISBN 13

9780007396498

The Summer Before the Dark

By: Doris Lessing

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The Summer Before the Dark

By: Doris Lessing

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.

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Page Count

285

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307777677

ISBN 13

9780307777676

Love, Again

By: Doris Lessing

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Love, Again

By: Doris Lessing

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.

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356

Publisher

HarperCollins UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

0007389396

ISBN 13

9780007389391

In Pursuit of the English

A Documentary

By: Doris Lessing

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In Pursuit of the English

A Documentary

By: Doris Lessing

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.

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Page Count

182

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

006203488X

ISBN 13

9780062034885

Landlocked

By: Doris Lessing

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Landlocked

By: Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing is the Cassandra of the documentary novel...crying for something harshly denied to our age: a longing for magic, for the irrational. Her concern for life, her independence of judgment and her gift for diagnosing our hydra-headed social ills is extraordinary." — The Observer In the aftermath of World War II, Martha Quest finds herself completely disillusioned. She is losing faith with the communist movement in Africa, and her marriage to one of the movement's leaders is disintegrating. Determined to resist the erosion of her personality, she engages in the first satisfactory love affair and breaks free, if only momentarily, from her suffocating unhappiness. Landlocked is the fourth novel of Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence sequence of novels, each a masterpiece in its own right, and collectively an incisive, all encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

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Page Count

412

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0061991821

ISBN 13

9780061991820

Stories

Introduction by Margaret Drabble

By: Doris Lessing

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Stories

Introduction by Margaret Drabble

By: Doris Lessing

This wide-ranging collection of the stories by the renowned Nobel Laureate—spanning more than two decades of her astonishing career—highlights her singular gifts for portraying the complex lives of men and women in a modern, often alienating world. Included are seminal stories like “To Room Nineteen,” in which a woman reacts against the oppression of her banal marriage with dreadful results; “One off the Short List,” which traces the surprising conclusion to a seduction gone awry; “The Habit of Loving,” in which a lonely older man who takes a vivacious, young wife witnesses an unexpected reversal of intimacy. Here are two classic novellas as well: The Temptation of Jack Orkney and The Other Woman, which exemplify Lessing’s grasp of the most essential human psychology. Rich and various in mood and background—the settings range across England and France—these stories powerfully convey the uncompromising insight, intelligence, and vision of one of the most ardently admired writers of our time.

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Page Count

698

Publisher

Everyman's Library

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307269884

ISBN 13

9780307269881

The Sweetest Dream

A Novel

By: Doris Lessing

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The Sweetest Dream

A Novel

By: Doris Lessing

“[Lessing] is a pro, writing at the top of her powers, realistically, passionately, accessibly…. a stirring novel”—San Francisco Chronicle Frances Lennox stands at her stove, bringing another feast to readiness before ladling it out to the youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table—her two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends and new friends fresh off the street. It’s London in the 1960s and everything is being challenged and changed. But what is being tolerated? Comrade Johnny delivers political tirades, then laps up the adolescent adulation before disappearing into the night to evade the clutches of his responsibilities. Johnny’s mother funds all but finds she can embrace only one lost little girl—Sylvia, who leaves for a South African village dying of AIDS. These are the people dreaming the Sixties into being and who, on the morning after, woke to find they were the ones taxed with cleaning up and making good.

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Page Count

511

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0061760331

ISBN 13

9780061760334

Time Bites

Views and Reviews

By: Doris Lessing

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Time Bites

Views and Reviews

By: Doris Lessing

“A generous and pleasurable collection. . . . Vibrant and illuminating, with quotable lines on every page. . . . [Lessing is] a superb essayist: lucid, wise, knowledgeable, and witty.”— Booklist In this collection of the very best of Doris Lessing’s essays we are treated to the wisdom and keen insight of a writer who has learned, over the course of a brilliant career, to read the world differently. From imagining the secret sex life of Tolstoy to the secrets of Sufism, from reviews of classic books to commentaries on world politics, these essays span an impressive range of subjects, cultures, periods, and themes, yet they are remarkably consistent in one key regard: Lessing’s clear-eyed vision and clearly-expressed prose. But in its breadth and precision Time Bites is more: it is also a map of the human spirit and an intimate diagram of the mind of one of our greatest living writers.

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Page Count

403

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0061967742

ISBN 13

9780061967740

A Ripple From the Storm

By: Doris Lessing

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A Ripple From the Storm

By: Doris Lessing

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.

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Page Count

336

Publisher

Harper Perennial

Published Date

ISBN 10

0060976640

ISBN 13

9780060976644

Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

A Psychological Thriller

By: Doris Lessing

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Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

A Psychological Thriller

By: Doris Lessing

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.

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317

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307390616

ISBN 13

9780307390615

The Golden Notebook

A Novel

By: Doris Lessing

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The Golden Notebook

A Novel

By: Doris Lessing

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 communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. 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. Doris Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

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Page Count

694

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0061582484

ISBN 13

9780061582486

On Cats

By: Doris Lessing

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On Cats

By: Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing's love affair with cats began at a young age, when she became intrigued with the semiferal creatures on the African farm where she grew up. Her fascination with the handsome, domesticated creatures that have shared her flats and her life in London remained undiminished, and grew into real love with the awkwardly lovable El Magnifico, the last cat to share her home. On Cats is a celebrated classic, a memoir in which we meet the cats that have slunk and bullied and charmed their way into Doris Lessing's life. She tells their stories—their exploits, rivalries, terrors, affections, ancient gestures, and learned behaviors—with vivid simplicity. And she tells the story of herself in relation to cats: the way animals affect her and she them, and the communication that grows possible between them—a language of gesture and mood and desire as eloquent as the spoken word. No other writer conveys so truthfully the real interdependence of humans and cats or convinces us with such stunning recognition of the reasons why cats really matter.

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Page Count

185

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0061981958

ISBN 13

9780061981951

Ben, In the World

The Sequel to the Fifth Child

By: Doris Lessing

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Ben, In the World

The Sequel to the Fifth Child

By: Doris Lessing

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.

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182

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0061967874

ISBN 13

9780061967870

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

By: Doris Lessing

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Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

By: Doris Lessing

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 Prize-winning author of more than thirty books, Doris Lessing is one of our most challenging and important writers.

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House of Anansi

Published Date

ISBN 10

177089022X

ISBN 13

9781770890220

Going Home

By: Doris Lessing

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Going Home

By: Doris Lessing

Africa belongs to the Africans; the sooner they take it back the better. But—a country also belongs to those who feel at home in it. Perhaps it may be that love of Africa the country will be strong enough to link people who hate each other now. Perhaps..." Going Home is Doris Lessing's account of her first journey back to Africa, the land in which she grew up and in which so much of her emotion and her concern are still invested. Returning to Southern Rhodesia in 1956, she found that her love of Africa had remained as strong as her hatred of the idea of "white supremacy" espoused by its ruling class. Going Home evokes brilliantly the experience of the people, black and white, who have shaped and will shape a beloved country.

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Page Count

327

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0061991198

ISBN 13

9780061991196

Alfred and Emily

By: Doris Lessing

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Alfred and Emily

By: Doris Lessing

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.

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Page Count

292

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0061862495

ISBN 13

9780061862496

Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist

By: Doris Lessing

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Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist

By: Doris Lessing

This collection brings together three of Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing’s most acclaimed novels.

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Page Count

1387

Publisher

HarperCollins UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

0007572638

ISBN 13

9780007572632

A Proper Marriage

By: Doris Lessing

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A Proper Marriage

By: Doris Lessing

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.

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Page Count

450

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0062047930

ISBN 13

9780062047939

To Room Nineteen

By: Doris Lessing

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To Room Nineteen

By: Doris Lessing

From To Room Nineteen, a study of a 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 collection of stories bears witness to Doris Lessing's perspective on the human condition.

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Page Count

404

Publisher

HarperCollins UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

0007143001

ISBN 13

9780007143009

The Grandmothers

By: Doris Lessing

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The Grandmothers

By: Doris Lessing

Four novellas by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, that once again show her to be unequalled in her ability to capture the truth of the human condition.

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Page Count

324

Publisher

HarperCollins UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

0007383568

ISBN 13

9780007383566

The Sweetest Dream

By: Doris Lessing

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The Sweetest Dream

By: Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in her most involving, most personal, most political novel for some years

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Page Count

478

Published Date

ISBN 10

0007130198

ISBN 13

9780007130191

Dans ma peau

Autobiographie (1919-1949)

By: Doris May Lessing

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Dans ma peau

Autobiographie (1919-1949)

By: Doris May Lessing

Voici un livre clé de la grande romancière, auteur avec Le Carnet d'or, Les Enfants de la violence, La Terroriste, etc., d'une des œuvres les plus fortes et les plus significatives de notre temps.Sans illusion sur les pièges de la mémoire, mais avec rigueur et sincérité, Doris Lessing nous livre ici l'expérience d'une vie commencée en Perse en 1919, entre un père mutilé par la guerre et une mère dissimulant sous un masque de rigorisme une profonde insatisfaction.La Rhodésie où grandit l'enfant, l'éveil de sa sensualité, le sentiment de révolte humaine et bientôt politique qui la pousse à la rupture avec les siens : tel est à grands traits le panorama de ce livre, qui s'achève en 1949 avec l'installation à Londres de Doris, deux fois divorcée, un manuscrit dans sa valise. Car, derrière la militante et la jeune femme "émancipée ", la romancière est en train de naître...Doris Lessing est quelqu'un qui continue à donner un sens à des mots qui l'ont perdu aux yeux de beaucoup : Le non-conformisme et la médiocrité, la chaleur des moments singuliers et la force des exigences morales, le refus et l'engagement. Quelqu'un qui prend au sérieux la vie, les humains.Jean Chesneaux, La Quinzaine littéraire.

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