Book description
'The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five' is the second volume
in Doris Lessing's celebrated space fiction series, 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'.
In this interlinked quintet of novels, she creates a new extraordinary
cosmos where the fate of the Earth is influenced by the rivalries and
interactions of three powerful galactic empires, Canopus, Sirius and
their enemy, Puttiora. Blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris
Lessing's astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the
history of our own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable,
tragic self-destruction. 'Doris Lessing's preoccupation with the
balance and dominance and need between the sexes has here extraordinary
scope. A visionary fable full of strong, romantic ideas.'
GAY FIRTH, The Times
'Doris Lessing has chosen the language of fairy tales in order to keep
the memory of ordinary earthlings' sexual love, its antagonisms, its
moments of bliss. Her touch is glancing, amused, feline throughout.'
MARINA WARNER, Sunday Times
''The Marriages' is a feminist allegory of the relations between the
sexes, full of the constant charm of the unexpected and the discoveries
of an imagination surrendering itself to the momentum of its own
narrative and visual invention.'
ROBERT TOWERS, 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'.
