Tre racconti, pervasi dall'imprevisto, dal senso sconcertante delle umane possibilità, dalla sensazione da parte dei protagonisti di precipitare nella vita e di esserne, allo stesso tempo, ai margini. Due amiche, alla scomparsa dei mariti, iniziano una relazione ciascuna con il figlio adolescente dell'altra. Una ragazzina di colore, orfana e povera, ha una breve relazione con un ragazzo ricco, bianco, di famiglia liberale. All'insaputa del giovane, ha una figlia e quando la bambina ha sei anni, non potendo più mantenerla, si mette in contatto con la famiglia del ragazzo. Un soldato vive nel ricordo di una donna incontrata durante la seconda guerra mondiale, nella convinzione di aver concepito un figlio e di aver condotto un'esistenza sbagliata.

Shows the connection between extreme cult manipulation and group pressures that can be found in any organization.

A fascinating look inside the mind of a man who is supposedly “mad.” Professor Charles Watkins of Cambridge University is a patient at a mental hospital where the doctors try with increasing drugs to bring his mind under control. But Watkins has embarked on a tremendous psychological adventure where, after spinning endlessly on a raft in the Atlantic, he lands on a tropical island inhabited by strange creatures with strange customs. Later, he is carried off on a cosmic journey into space…

Frances Lennox ladles out dinner every night to the motley, exuberant, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable tableher two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends, and ftesh-off-the-street friends. It's the early 1960s and certainly 'everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.' Except financial circumstances demand that Frances and her sons Eve with her proper ex-mother-in-law. And her ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, has just dumped his second wife's problem child at Frances's feet. And the world's political landscape has suddenly become surreal beyond imagination....

Set against the backdrop of the decade that changed the world forever, The Sweetest Dream is a riveting look at a group of people who dared to dream-and faced the inevitable cleanup afterward -- from one of the greatest writers of our time.

Questo libro raccoglie un ciclo di lezioni che vennero trasmesse per la prima volta nel programma radiofonico canadese 'Ideas', nel 1985. La scrittrice, resa celebre dalle sue opere narrative, si rivela in questi brevi saggi capace anche di analisi socio-antropologiche. Dove finisce la nostra libertà e dove comincia quella del vicino? Passando dal ricordo delle sue esperienze di bambina nella Rhodesia del Sud alle riflessioni sulle dinamiche di gruppo nell'era della comunicazione di massa, la Lessing ci racconta del sottile filo che separa l'esercizio della libertà da quello della brutalità, di un pericoloso ritorno al primitivo che caratterizza i rapporti individuali, il dibattito politico e le relazioni internazionali nella nostra epoca.

Two reissues in the Flamingo }Modern Classic{ series.

Raccontando le storie e le alterne vicende dei gatti che da sempre hanno accompagnato i suoi spostamenti dall'Africa all'Inghilterra di oggi, Doris Lessing compone un singolare ritratto di sé e dei suoi rapporti con questi domestici animali. L'autrice osserva i piccoli felini che vivono in casa sua e racconta storie tenere, allegre, commoventi, talvolta tragiche e dolorose. Il libro è stato pubblicato in Italia nel 1990 e più volte ristampato.

Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in her most involving, most personal, most political novel for some years. In 2001, Doris Lessing was awarded the David Cohen British Literature Prize for a lifetime of excellence, consol

Janna, bella ed elegante, con alle spalle un solido successo professionale, conosce una piccola e vecchia signora, Maudie, e da questo incontro casuale nasce una stretta amicizia, un legame quasi simbiotico. La prima comincia a condividere le manie e le abitudini della seconda, i suoi malanni senili, e viene così a contatto con un mondo disordinato e dolente ma anche affascinante, che le permette di scoprire dimensioni esistenziali da lei ignorate fino a quel momento. Il diario di Jane Somers si configura, nel panorama contemporaneo della letteratura in lingua inglese, come uno dei più impietosi esperimenti di autoanalisi mai compiuti da uno scrittore

Anni fatti di speranze, di lotte, di sofferenze. Sono gli anni Sessanta e il clan Lennox sembra non volersi risparmiare nessuna contraddizione. Due donne straordinarie, Julia e Frances, infinitamente diverse ma unite nella protezione della prole, combattono per i 'ragazzi' contro tutti gli ostacoli. Fra tutti il peggiore è il Compagno Johnny, padre dei ragazzi, figlio di Julia ed ex marito di Frances. 'La rivoluzione viene prima delle questioni personali' è il motto che recita mentre deposita mogli scartate e figli danneggiati nella grande casa di Julia.

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.

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.

In questi racconti, tra i primi scritti da Doris Lessing, si ritrova già compiuta la capacità 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.

Thousands of years in the future, all the northern hemisphere is buried under the ice and snow of a new Ice Age. At the southern end of a large landmass called Ifrik, two children of the Mahondi people, seven-year old Mara and her younger brother, Dann, are abducted from their home in the middle of the night. Raised as outsiders in a poor rural village, Mara and Dann learn to survive the hardships and dangers of a life threatened as much by an unforgiving climate and menacing animals as by a hostile community of Rock People. Eventually they join the great human migration North, away from the drought that is turning the southern land to dust, and in search of a place with enough water and food to support human life. Traveling across the continent, the siblings enter cities rife with crime, power struggles, and corruption, learning as much about human nature as about how societies function. With a clear-eyed vision of the human condition, Mara and Dann is imaginative fiction at its best.

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 year. 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 reviles part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

Nel 1949 Doris Lessing, trentenne con due matrimoni alle spalle e la scelta difficile di lasciare il primo marito con due bambini, approda in una Londra grigia, fumosa, devastata dai bombardamenti, povera fino alla miseria. Dalla calda Rhodesia del Sud, dove un provvedimento governativo di cui lei è all'oscuro la qualifica come indesiderabile per le sue attività 'sovversive', porta con sé il figlio Peter, cinque anni, figlio di secondo letto e il dattiloscritto di 'L'erba canta', il suo primo romanzo. Londra rappresenta per lei l'uscita dall'ambiente provinciale e ultraconservatore della colonia, dove è cresciuta insieme al padre invalido e alla madre, una donna frustrata nelle sue ambizioni piccolo borghesi dalla vita da pionieri in Rhodesia.

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 second volume of Doris Lessing's extraordinary autobiography covers the years 1949-62, from her arrival in war-weary London with her son, Peter, and the manuscript for her first novel, The Grass is Singing, under her arm to the publication of her most famous work of fiction, The Golden Notebook. She describes how communism dominated the intellectual life of the 1950s and how she, like nearly all communists, became disillusioned with extreme and rhetorical politics and left communism behind. Evoking the bohemian days of a young writer and single mother, Lessing speaks openly about her writing process, her friends and lovers, her involvement in the theater, and her political activities. Walking in the Shade is an invaluable social history as well as Doris Lessing's Sentimental Education.

Corredato da un ampio numero di immagini tratte dall'album di famiglia, il volume, il cui titolo 'Under my skin' riprende un verso di una canzone di Cole Porter, ripercorre in prima persona un arco di tempo che va dal 1919 al 1949. Si tratta, come recita il sottotitolo, del primo volume dell'autobiografia di Doris Lessing, che con l'ausilio di immagini e di documenti pubblici e privati, racconta nei dettagli la storia di cinque generazioni, mettendo in primo piano gli anni centrali della sua esistenza, dalla nascita fino ai trent'anni.

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.

'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 thepeople, black and white, who have shaped and will shape a beloved country.

Dorris Lessing's classic series of autobiographical novels is the fictional counterpart to Under My Skin. In these five novels, first published in the 1950's and 60s, Doris Lessing transformed her fascinating life into fiction, creating her most complex and compelling character, Martha Quest.

'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.

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 twentiethcentury.