Book description
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. 'This ambitious novel has no
equal.' Guardian
'At the beginning of the Sixties, this vast, frank, complicated novel
helped to sustain our reputation for courageous, ambitious, experimental
writing. Soon a worldwide bestseller, it is still Lessing's finest work.
“The Golden Notebook” captured the heady mix of the early Sixties, when
not just novels but political certainties were dissolving. The rising
feminist movement seized it as a Bible.' Mail on Sunday
'Her greatest work…Shows the power of the female imagination at full
throttle. It doesn't bear a simple political message but it does rip off
the masks that women were accustomed to wearing, and it shows up the
dangers and difficulties that women encounter if they try to live a free
life in a man's world…A landmark novel, a book that both changed and
explained a generation…One of the finest writers of the century.' Independent
'Doris Lessing is a pioneer of feminist self-consciousness in its raw
state…The truths contained in “The Golden Notebook” are indeed harsh. It
can also be said that these particular truths have not been examined in
so rigorous and exemplary a fashion since the first appearance of this
extraordinary book. A seminal work.' Anita Brookner, LRB
'“The Golden Notebook” is the diary of a writer in shock, a young woman
determined to forge a life as a “free woman”, as an “intellectual”.
Doris Lessing is a writer of considerable power, someone who can close
her eyes and “give” a situation by the sheer force of her emotional
energy.' Joan Didion, New York Times Doris Lessing was the winner of
the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature and is one 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 two volumes of
autobiography, 'Under my Skin' and 'Walking in the Shade', her most
recent novel is 'The Cleft'.
