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 spanning more than half a century, 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 cover 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.

The Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing's first novel is a taut and tragic portrayal of a crumbling marriage, set in South Africa during the years of Arpartheid. Set in Rhodesia, 'The Grass is Singing' tells the story of Dick Turner, a failed white farmer and his wife, Mary, a town girl who hates the bush and viciously abuses the black South Africans who work on their farm. But after many years, trapped by poverty, sapped by the heat of their tiny house, the lonely and frightened Mary turns to Moses, the black cook, for kindness and understanding. A masterpiece of realism, 'The Grass is Singing' is a superb evocation of Africa's majestic beauty, an intense psychological portrait of lives in confusion and, most of all, a fearless exploration of the ideology of white supremacy.

'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 1950's to the 1990's bears stunning witness to Doris Lessing's perspective on the human condition.

'"The stories in 'To Room Nineteen'' are part of the intellectual apparatus of anybody alive in England in the Fifties. I can't begin to evaluate some of them objectively; 'The Habit of Loving' and the dazzlingly cynical 'One Off The Shortlist' shaped the way I, for one, perceived the world."'
ANGELA CARTER, 'Guardian'

'"For Doris Lessing, private lives, private sins and private blisses are aspects of history, so that even in short stories, she is a chronicler of her time and its conscience too".'
LORNA SAGE, 'Observer'

Long considered Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing's best collection of short stories, "African Stories"--a central book in the work of a truly beloved writer--is now back in print. This beautiful collection is an homage to her twenty-five years spent in Africa and a brilliant portrait of African life.
This is Doris Lessing's Africa--where she lived for twenty-five years and where so much of her interest and concern still resides. Here in these stories, Lessing explores the complexities, the agonies and joys, and the textures of life in Africa.
First published in 1965, and out of print since the 1990s, this collection contains much of Ms. Lessing's most extraordinary work. It is a brilliant portrait of a world that is vital to all of us--perceived by an artist of the first rank writing with passion and honesty about her native land.
"African Stories" includes every story Doris Lessing has written about Africa: all of her first collection, "This Was the Old Chief's Country"; the four tales about Africa from "Five"; the African stories from "The Habit of Loving" and "A Man and Two Women;" and four stories featured only in this edition.
"African Stories" represents some of Doris Lessing's best work--and is an essential book by one of the twentieth century's most important authors.

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

The landmark novel of the Sixties - a powerful account of a woman searching for her personal, political and professional identity while facing rejection and betrayal. In 1950s London, novelist Anna Wulf struggles with writer's block. Divorced with a young child, and fearful of going mad, Anna records her experiences in four coloured notebooks: black for her writing life, red for political views, yellow for emotions, blue for everyday events. But it is a fifth notebook - the golden notebook - that finally pulls these wayward strands of her life together. Widely regarded as Doris Lessing's masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, 'The Golden Notebook' is wry and perceptive, bold and indispensable.

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 the childhood where the first book ended 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. As in Mara and Dann, Doris Lessing in this newest book returns to 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. Again, it is one of Lessi

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come. In 1950s London, novelist Anna Wulf struggles with writer's block. Divorced with a young child, and fearful of going mad, Anna records her experiences in four coloured notebooks: black for her writing life, red for political views, yellow for emotions, blue for everyday events. But it is a fifth notebook - the golden notebook - that finally pulls these wayward strands of her life together. Widely regarded as Doris Lessing's masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, 'The Golden Notebook' is wry and perceptive, bold and indispensable.

A collection of charming and celebrated writings about cats, from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Doris Lessing's love affair with cats began at a young age, when she became intrigued with the semi-feral creatures on the African farm where she grew up. Her fascination remained undiminished by the handsome domesticated creatures who shared her flats and her life in London and grew into real love with El Magnifico, the awkwardly lovable cat who in his later years suffered the great indignity of becoming a three-legged beast. Consisting of Lessing's celebrated collection of stories, 'Particularly Cats and Rufus', and the poignant though unsentimental memoir, 'The Old Age of El Magnifico', this book is a brilliant evocation of the feline world.

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the second instalment in the visionary novel cycle 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'. This is the story of the kindly Queen of Zone Three, who rules a land free of all harshness, and her forced marriage with the soldier-king of Zone Four, which is hierarchic, disciplined, inflexible, dutiful. This apparently difficult marriage, unwanted by both, requires a compromise between impulse and reason, between instinct and logic. Ben Ata learns to accept and then to love the ruler of Zone Three and her alien ways; and she learns to love and to need him. But when the Queen is commanded by the Providers to return to her own realm, she must obey, shattering though it is to leave her husband and child. Ben Ata, in turn, is ordered to marry the savage beauty who rules Zone Five, a land that both unites and reverses the other two Zones. In 'The Marriages ...' Doris Lessing uses science-fiction brilliantly to investigate the conflict between men and women. Once again, invented planets allow her to deploy her unillusioned knowledge of the real world of the reader.

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 once again that she is one of our most valuable and insightful living authors.

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 Noteboo"k retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

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 embarks on one final epic endeavor, a retelling of the history of human creation. The story he relates is the little-known saga of the Clefts, an ancient community of women with no knowledge of nor need for men. Childbirth was controlled through the cycles of the moon, and only female offspring were born--until the unanticipated event that jeopardized the harmony of their close-knit society: the strange, unheralded birth of a boy.

Dann is grown up now, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization. With his trusted companions--Mara's daughter, his hope for the future; the abandoned child-soldier Griot, who discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories; and the snow dog, a faithful friend who brings him back from the depths of despair--Dann embarks on a strange and captivating adventure in a suddenly colder, more watery climate in the north.

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the invalid Sir Clifford. Unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, Clifford encourages her to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to her husband's gamekeeper and embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled existence. Can she find a true equality with Mellors, despite the vast gulf between their positions in society? One of the most controversial novels in English literature, Lady Chatterley's Lover is an erotically charged and psychologically powerful depiction of adult relationships.

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 ...

An extraordinary blend of fantasy and realism, this is classic Lessing, reissued here with a stunning new cover design. 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 f

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.

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 its variety, its diversity, its transitoriness, the way it connects the life of animals and birds in the parks to the streets. Lessing's fiction also explores the darker corners of relationships between women and men, as in the rich and emotionally complex title story, in which she uncovers a more parlous reality behind the facade of the most conventional relationship between the sexes.

Spectacular gardens are viewed from the perspective of a snail in Virginia Woolf's 'Kew Gardens' and from that of a sheltered teenage girl in Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party'. The family of Doris Lessing's 'Flavours of Exile' haul succulent vegetables and fruits from the rich African soil, and Colette in 'Bygone Spring' luxuriates in extravagantly blooming flowers. Children discover their own peculiar paradises in Sandra Cisneros's 'The Monkey Garden' and Italo Calvino's 'The Enchanted Garden', while adult gardeners find things that move and haunt them in William Maxwell's 'The French Scarecrow' and Jamaica Kincaid's 'The Garden I Have in Mind'. Gardens of the mind round out the anthology: the beautiful but fatal garden of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'Rappaccini's Daughter', the crystal buds of J. G. Ballard's 'The Garden of Time', ravenous orchids in John Collier's 'Green Thoughts', and Aoko Matsuda's 'Planting', in which a young woman plants each day whatever she has been given - roses and violets, buttons and broken cups, love and fear and sorrow. An entrancing book for everyone who loves gardens and the beauty of nature.

The third in Doris Lessing's visionary novel cycle "Canopus in Argos: Archives". It is a mix of fable, futuristic fantasy and pseudo-documentary accounts of 20th-century history.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the fourth instalment in the visionary novel cycle 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'. The handsome, intelligent people of Planet 8 of the Canopean Empire know only an idyllic existence on their bountiful planet, its weather consistently nurturing, never harsh. They live long, purposeful, untroubled lives. Then one day The Ice begins, and ice and snow cover the planet's surface. Crops and animals die off, and the people must learn to live with this new desolation. Their only hope is that, as they have been promised, they will be taken from Planet 8 to a new world. But when the Canopean ambassador, Johor, finally arrives, he has devastating news: they will die along with their planet. Slowly they come to understand that their salvation may lie in the creation of one Representative who can save what is most essential to them. Lessing has written a frightening and, finally, hopeful book, a profound and thought-provoking contribution to the science-fiction genre the novel generally.

Love, Again tells the story of a 65-year-old woman who falls in love and struggles to maintain her sanity. Widowed for many years, with grown children, Sarah is a writer who works in the theater in London. During the production of a play, she falls in love with a seductive young actor, the beautiful and androgynous 28-year-old Bill, 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. 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.

Banned and vindicated, condemned and lauded, Lady Chatterley's Lover is D.H. Lawrence's seminal novel of illicit passion and forbidden desire. Lady Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the Sir Clifford. Paralysed in the First World War, Sir Clifford is unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, and encourages her instead to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to Oliver Mellors, her husband's gamekeeper, with whom she embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled existence. Can she find true love with Mellors, despite the vast gulf between their positions in society? One of the most controversial novels in English literature, Lady Chatterley's Lover is an erotically charged and psychologically powerful depiction of adult relationships. In her introduction Doris Lessing discusses the influence of Lawrence's sexual politics, his relationship with his wife Frieda and his attitude towards the First World War. Using the complete and restored text of the Cambridge edition, this volume includes a new chronology and further reading by Paul Poplawski and notes by Michael Squires. Edited with notes by Michael Squires and an introduction by Doris Lessing. 'A brave and important book, passionate and wildly ambitious' Independent on Sunday 'A masterpiece' Guardian

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 snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion, and instinct laid bare to experience. For her, this is a time of solitary reading daydreams, dancing -- and the first disturbing encounters with sex. The first of Doris Lessing's timeless Children of Violence novels, Martha Quest is an endearing masterpiece.