'I was born with skins too few. Or they were scrubbed off me by...robust and efficient hands.'

The experiences absorbed through these 'skins too few' are evoked in this memoir of Doris Lessing's childhood and youth as the daughter of a British colonial family in Persia and Southern Rhodesia Honestly and with overwhelming immediacy, Lessing maps the growth of her consciousness, her sexuality, and her politics, offering a rare opportunity to get under her skin and discover the forces that made her one of the most distinguished writers of our time.

A Doris Lessing backlist title, new in Flamingo paperback.

The beautiful 'glass girl' Luz is pursued from one imaginary country to another by Luke, whose love for her becomes a pathological obsession. Luke is as bewitched, too, by the Indris, singing lemurs whose magical harmonies he encounters in a tropical forest of pellucid charms. The lemurs have no enemies in their jungle world 'where intelligence and affection were cherished, and destruction and cruelty had no place'.
Luke has chosen his wandering life of exile to escape his own shortcomings and failure in human relations. And he wants to protect Luz, estranged from her sadistic husband Chas. Luke himself reveals shades of latent sadism and becomes dependent on tablets that induce horror, shame and ecstatic excitement.

Dopo un esilio durato 25 anni per la sua opposizione al regime bianco razzista della Rhodesia, Doris Lessing ritorna nell'odierno Zimbabwe per quattro volte dal 1982 al 1992: il libro č il resoconto di queste visite. E' un libro della memoria, la Lessing evoca la sua infanzia passata in una fattoria isolata nel bush, i suoi genitori, suo fratello ed esplora i modi spesso inaspettati in cui gli elementi della tradizione africana del passato oggi si fondono alle abitudini dei bianchi.

A highly personal story of the eminent British writer returning to her African roots that is 'brilliant . . . [and] captures the contradictions of a young country.'--New York Times Book Review

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.

In questi racconti, tra i primi scritti da Doris Lessing, si ritrova gią compiuta la capacitą della scrittrice di rappresentare sentimenti ed atmosfere. Al centro di ogni racconto si muove una donna, la quale, in ambienti e situazioni ogni volta diversi, ne diventa il punto focale.