Book description
With the four short novels in this collection, Doris Lessing once again
proves that she is unequalled in her ability to capture the truth of the
human condition.
The title story, 'The Grandmothers', is an astonishing tour de force, a
shockingly intimate portrait of an unconventional extended family and
the lengths to which they will go to find happiness and love. Written
with a keen cinematic eye, the story is a ruthless dissection of the
veneer of middle-class morality and convention which manages to be at
once universal and desperately, heartbreakingly personal.
A second story, 'Victoria and the Staveneys', takes us through 20 years
of the life of a young underprivilged black girl in London. A chance
meeting introduces her to the world of the Staveneys - a liberal white
middle-class family - and, seduced, she falls pregnant by one of the
sons. As her young daughter grows up, Victoria feels her parental
control diminishing as the attractions of the Staveney's world exert
themselves. An honest and often uncomfortable look at race relations in
London over the past few decades, Lessing reaffirms her brilliance at
demonstrating the effect of society on the individual.
With these and two other equally brilliant novellas, Lessing has proven
once again that she is one of our most valuable and insightful living
authors. 'Lessing's prose is as vigorous in these stories as it has
ever been. She has an extraordinary feel not only for landscape but also
for the human creature within it.' The Times
'In these four tales Lessing shows her adaptability, and her capacity
to unify the most far-flung territories of human experience. Like all
great writers, she brings a multitudinous sensibility to bear on
individual people, on single rooms, on particular moments - and she
makes them live.' Daily Telegraph
'Doris Lessing has changed the way we think about the world.' Blake Morrison
'Thank goodness for Doris Lessing. While the rest of us flounder about
noisily in the muddy waters of life, she never fails to expose with
startling clarity the essential folly of our dreams and good
intentions.' Kate Chisholm, Evening Standard
'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 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'.
