Book description
In the early post-war years, Doris Lessing left her native Southern
Africa in search of a grail. But the English she pursued - and found -
were living in working-class homes in East London. They were lusty,
quarrelsome, unscrupulous and full-blooded - quite unlike what they were
supposed to be.
In the early post-war years, Doris Lessing left her native Southern
Africa in search of a grail - a life of glamour and refinement that she
naively believed England offered everyone. A fascinating, hilarious
memoir of her first impressions of her adopted country, 'In Pursuit of
the English' brilliantly captures Lessing's constant wonder at and
growing affection for the people she came to know: the working-class of
the East End of London. Lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous and
full-blooded, they were quite unlike the English she had expected to
find… 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'.
