The Grass is Singing

The Grass is Singing
Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: Heinemann
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1973
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780435901318

This murder story features a Rhodesian farmer's wife and her houseboy.

Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog
Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061874795

“Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the past 100 years, a shrewd visionary. . . . Her new, short, haunting novel . . . succors us with . . . unforgettable visual images. We shiver and marvel as we lose ourselves in time.”— The Times (London) In her visionary novel Mara and Dann, Doris Lessing introduced a brother and sister battling through a future landscape defined by extreme climates in the north and south. In this new novel the odyssey continues. Dann is grown up, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization, traveling with his friend, a snow dog who saves him from the depths of despair. Here, too, are Mara’s daughter and Griot with the green eyes, an abandoned child-soldier who discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories. Like its predecessor, this brilliant novel from one of our greatest living writers explains as much about our world as it does about the future we may be heading toward.

Devil's Valley

Devil's Valley
Author: André Brink
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2011-02-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1446450996

Flip Lochner is a weary and disillusioned newspaper crime reporter. Curious to find out more about the origins of a casual acquaintance, he descends into Devil's Valley where, like Dante's Virgil, he encounters a bewildering array of mysterious characters and events that lead him to reevaluate the world in which he lives and which he thought he knew. Fusing invention and reality, magic realism and earthy humour, Lochner's adventures in the valley centre around the journey he undertakes to discover the truth about the elusive and erotic figure of Emma, one of Brink's most remarkable creations.

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2003
Genre: Women and literature
ISBN: 0791074412

Essays of critical interpretation portray views of Doris Lessing's work, including The Golden Notebook, Marriages, and The Grass is Singing..

The Fifth Child

The Fifth Child
Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2010-11-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307777642

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 Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook
Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 694
Release: 2008-10-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061582484

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.

Shikasta

Shikasta
Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Total Pages: 448
Release: 1994
Genre: English fiction
ISBN: 9780006547198

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the first instalment in the visionary novel cycle 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'. The story of the final days of our planet is told through the reports of Johor, an emissary sent from Canopus. Earth, now named Shikasta (the Stricken) by the kindly, paternalistic Canopeans who colonised it many centuries ago, is under the influence of the evil empire of Puttiora. War, famine, disease and environmental disasters ravage the planet. To Johor, mankind is a 'totally crazed species', racing towards annihilation: his orders to save humanity set him what seems to be an impossible task. Blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing's astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of our own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic self-destruction.

Ben, In the World

Ben, In the World
Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061967874

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.