The Grass Is Singing

This murder story features a Rhodesian farmer's wife and her houseboy.

This collection brings together three of Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing’s most acclaimed novels.

Flip Lochner is a weary and disillusioned newspaper crime reporter. Curious to find out more about the origins of a casual acquaintance, he descends into Devil's Valley where, like Dante's Virgil, he encounters a bewildering array of mysterious characters and events that lead him to reevaluate the world in which he lives and which he thought he knew. Fusing invention and reality, magic realism and earthy humour, Lochner's adventures in the valley centre around the journey he undertakes to discover the truth about the elusive and erotic figure of Emma, one of Brink's most remarkable creations.

“Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the past 100 years, a shrewd visionary. . . . Her new, short, haunting novel . . . succors us with . . . unforgettable visual images. We shiver and marvel as we lose ourselves in time.”— The Times (London) In her visionary novel Mara and Dann, Doris Lessing introduced a brother and sister battling through a future landscape defined by extreme climates in the north and south. In this new novel the odyssey continues. Dann is grown up, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization, traveling with his friend, a snow dog who saves him from the depths of despair. Here, too, are Mara’s daughter and Griot with the green eyes, an abandoned child-soldier who discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories. Like its predecessor, this brilliant novel from one of our greatest living writers explains as much about our world as it does about the future we may be heading toward.

Essays of critical interpretation portray views of Doris Lessing's work, including The Golden Notebook, Marriages, and The Grass is Singing..

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the first instalment in the visionary novel cycle 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'. The story of the final days of our planet is told through the reports of Johor, an emissary sent from Canopus. Earth, now named Shikasta (the Stricken) by the kindly, paternalistic Canopeans who colonised it many centuries ago, is under the influence of the evil empire of Puttiora. War, famine, disease and environmental disasters ravage the planet. To Johor, mankind is a 'totally crazed species', racing towards annihilation: his orders to save humanity set him what seems to be an impossible task. 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.

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. Doris Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

In her 1985 CBC Massey Lectures Doris Lessing addresses the question of personal freedom and individual responsibility in a world increasingly prone to political rhetoric, mass emotions, and inherited structures of unquestioned belief. The Nobel Prize-winning author of more than thirty books, Doris Lessing is one of our most challenging and important writers.

One day we had been well-off and secure; the old grey London house had been 'home' and we imagined that our lives . . . would continue to run smoothly forever. The next day it was all gone. For Anna Harcourt and her three daughters-lovely Helen, who always gets what she wants, young Jane, who makes the best of what she has, and Rosalie, the middle daughter who wavers somewhere in between-the world is turned upside down by their father's death and the discovery that they will have to sell their London home. The girls are shocked when Anna buys a cottage in Ryddelton, her home town in Scotland, but they soon settle in to Scottish life, each in her own way. As time passes, the three girls must contend with love and tragedy, hope and despair, laughter and tears, all unfolding with D.E. Stevenson's incomparable storytelling and knowledge of human nature. First published in 1958, Anna and Her Daughters is a compelling, poignant, and ultimately joyful tale of family, romance, and healing. This new edition includes an autobiographical sketch by the author. "Miss Stevenson has her own individual and charming way of seeing things." Western Mail

Far from resting on her laurels, Lessing goes from strength to strength. Ben's half-human ignorance, paranoia, and rage are magnificently imagined and vividly present on every page. The condition of the outsider has hardly ever before in fiction been portrayed with such raw power and righteous anger. Few, if any, living writers can have explored so many forbidding fictional worlds with such passion and conviction. — Kirkus Reviews The poignant and tragic sequel to Doris Lessing's bestselling novel, THE FIFTH CHILD. At eighteen, Ben is in the world, but not of it. He is too large, too awkward, too inhumanly made. Now estranged from his family, he must find his own path in life. From London and the south of France to Brazil and the mountains of the Andes. Ben is tossed about in a tumultuous search for his people, a reason for his being. How the world receives him, and, he fares in it will horrify and captivate until the novel's dramatic finale.