Book description
The first book after Doris' Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood
in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her
parents lead.
'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very
young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions?
Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the
use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.'
In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing
explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by
the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer,
but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to
wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who
drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the
Royal Free Hospital. In the first half of this book, Doris Lessing
imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there
been no war at all, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket
match outside Colchester as children but leading separate lives. This is
followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came
to be in the shadow of that war, their move to Rhodesia, a damaged
couple squatting over Doris's childhood in a strange land.
'Here I still am,' says Doris Lessing, 'trying to get out from under
that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.' With the publication of
Alfred and Emily she has done just that. Praise for Doris Lessing:
'She's up there in the pantheon with Balzac and George Eliot. We're
lucky she's still writing.' Lisa Appignanesi, Independent
'She has an extraordinary feeling for the peculiar vulnerabilities of
the young and the elderly. And her portraits of human relationships are
of quite staggering beauty.' Ruth Scurr, The Times
'Doris Lessing has changed the way we think about the world.' Blake Morrison
Praise for 'The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and
the Snow Dog':
'Lessing pierces the heart with the half quotations that Dann's scribes
scribble down as the books fall to dust in their hands … Lessing has
much wisdom to impart although she is astute enough not to preach but to
pose some unsettling questions.' Maggie Gee, Sunday Times Doris
Lessing is the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature and of the
most important writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Her
first novel, 'The Grass is Singing' was published in 1950, and since
then her international reputation has flourished. Among her other
celebrated novels are 'The Golden Notebook', 'The Summer Before the
Dark', and 'Memoirs of a Survivor'. Her most recent works include 'Love,
Again' and two volumes of her autobiography, 'Under my Skin', and
'Walking in the Shade'.
