Overview

A compelling vision of a disorietating and barbaric future from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Many years in the future, city life has broken down, communications have failed and food supplies are dwindling. From her window a middle-aged woman – our narrator – watches things fall apart and records what she witnesses: hordes of people migrating to the countryside, gangs of children roaming the streets. One day, a young girl, Emily, is brought to her house by a stranger and left in her care. A strange, precocious adolescent, drawn to the tribal streetlife and its barbaric rituals, she is unafraid of the harsh world outside, while our narrator retreats into her hidden world where reality fades and the past is revisited …

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9780006493259

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'Original and astonishing ... Brilliant persuasive and circumstantial in its imagination, so that each step towards barbarism seems completely necessary.' New Statesman 'For some years and books now [we] have been reading Doris Lessing to find out what's going on - what is happening to our society's nervous system and how it affects the way we live with each other ... She is one of those acute emotional intelligences whose stories provide keys to our personal dilemmas.' Guardian 'An extraordinary and compelling meditation about the enduring need for loyalty, love and responsibility in an unprecedented time.' Time

After touching down on common ground In The Summer Before the Dark, Doris Lessing has written another didactic, apocalyptic briefing which she has described elsewhere as an attempt at autobiography. But then all of her books have been autobiographical to a degree - all of them have been about women - while this one more markedly is about Woman, that uncomfortable presence. The self-trip takes place in a glum, anarchical present which is of course a projection of the near future although it keeps simultaneously returning to the past and the amenities that were. The city is bleak - all but a few people have left it, services have stopped, food is scarce. The woman here, an elderly one, is alone until Emily (and her familiar, an unsightly cat named Hugo) is visited upon her. Emily is an overserious, bright, undeceived girl of about twelve who keeps running off to join one of the scavenging communal packs of young people led by the attractive Gerald with whom she falls in love. In between her sorties, the woman and Hugo watch and wait; sometimes she opens endless doors to the endless rooms beyond her flat - all devastated; sometimes she attains more personal, if enclosed, experiences in which she witnesses Emily as child or as infant - or is it herself? At the end Gerald loses control over his entourage and Emily. But it is Emily transmuted who steps across the final threshold and there she was - the one person I had been looking for all this time. Read this as you will - as Mrs. Lessing's attempt to define herself and her tenacious sex; as a commentary on the strata of disintegrated society; on the stages of womankind, not only outmoded but outlived; on the levels of reality observed chiefly in regressive reverse. True, the Lessing name and perhaps more hold a certain initial inductive curiosity but somehow no matter how many doors are opened, unease, antipathy, cold and silence are there along with Her. (Kirkus Reviews)

'Original and astonishing ... Brilliant persuasive and circumstantial in its imagination, so that each step towards barbarism seems completely necessary.' New Statesman 'For some years and books now [we] have been reading Doris Lessing to find out what's going on - what is happening to our society's nervous system and how it affects the way we live with each other ... She is one of those acute emotional intelligences whose stories provide keys to our personal dilemmas.' Guardian `An extraordinary and compelling meditation about the enduring need for loyalty, love and responsibility in an unprecedented time.' Time

'Original and astonishing ! Brilliant persuasive and circumstantial in its imagination, so that each step towards barbarism seems completely necessary.' New Statesman 'For some years and books now [we] have been reading Doris Lessing to find out what's going on - what is happening to our society's nervous system and how it affects the way we live with each other ! She is one of those acute emotional intelligences whose stories provide keys to our personal dilemmas.' Guardian 'An extraordinary and compelling meditation about the enduring need for loyalty, love and responsibility in an unprecedented time.' Time

Author Information

"Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of ""The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"". She died in 2013."

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