The Sun Between Their Feet (Collected African Stories)

Literature & Fiction

DORIS LESSING

Contemporary

Flamingo

A beautifully produced edition of a new cat tale from Doris Lessing. A new short story from Doris Lessing about an awkwardly loveable old cat, to be produced as a beautiful small-format giftish hardback for the cat-loving part of the Christmas market.

The Old Age of El Magnifico

Particularly Cats

This much-acclaimed collection of stories vividly evokes both the grandeur of Africa, the glare of its sun and the wide open space, as well as the great, irresolvable tensions between whites and blacks. Tales of poor white farmers and their lonely wives, of storm air thick with locusts, of ants and pomegranate trees, black servants and the year of hunger in a native village - all combine to present a powerful image of a continent which seems incorruptible in spite of the people who plough, mine and plunder it to make their living. In Doris Lessing's own words, 'Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.'

The Sun Between Their Feet

The Sweetest Dream

Genre Fiction

First published by Michael Joseph in 1984, under a pseudonym, as 'The Diary of a Good Neighbour' and 'If the Old Could!', now published as 'The Diaries of Jane Somers', this is in many ways classic Lessing. As resonant with social and political themes as 'The Golden Notebook', Lessing returns to the realism of her early fiction with the wisdom and experience of maturity. The diaries introduce us to Jane, an intelligent and beautiful magazine editor concerned with success, clothes and comfort. But her real inadequacy is highlighted when first her husband, then her mother, die from cancer and Jane feels strangely removed. In an attempt to fill this void, she befriends ninety-something Maudie, whose poverty and squalor contrast so radically with the glamour and luxury of the magazine world. The two gradually come to depend on each other -- Maudie delighting Jane with tales of London in the 1920s and Jane trying to care for the rapidly deteriorating old woman. 'The Diary of Jane Somers' contrasts the helplessness of the elderly with that of the young as Jane is forced to care for her nineteen-year-old drop-out niece Kate who is struggling with an emotional breakdown. Jane realises that she understands young people as little as she so recently did the old.

The Diaries of Jane Somers

Spine creased, page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

The Golden Notebook

Harper-perennial

Doris Lessing, one of England's finest living novelists, invites us to imagine a mythical society free from sexual intrigue, free from jealousy, free from petty rivalries: a society free from men.  An old Roman senator, contemplative at his late stage of life, embarks on what will likely be his last endeavour: the retelling of the story of human creation. He recounts the history of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic, coastal wilderness, confined within the valley of an overshadowing mountain. The Clefts have no need nor knowledge of men -- childbirth is controlled, like the tides that lap around their feet, through the cycles of the moon, and their children are always female. But with the unheralded birth of a strange, new child -- a boy -- the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy.  At first, in their ignorance, the Clefts are awestruck by this seemingly malformed child, but as more and more of these threateningly unfamiliar males appear, now unfavourably nicknamed Squirts, they are rejected, and are exposed on the nearby mountainside; sacrificed to the patrolling eagles overhead, the sentinels of their female haven. Unbeknownst to the Clefts, however, these baby males survive, aided by the very eagles sent to kill them, and thrive on their own on the other side of the mountain. It is not until an unusually curious young Cleft named Maire goes beyond the geographical, and emotional, divide of the mountain that this disquieting fact is uncovered -- a discovery that forces the Clefts to accept and realign themselves to the prospect of a now shared world, and the possible vengeance of the wronged males.  In this fascinating and beguiling novel, Lessing confronts head-on the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women, two similar and yet thoroughly distinct creatures, manage to live side by side in the world, and how the specifics of gender affect every aspect of our existence.

The Cleft

Fourth Estate

Alfred and Emily

Harper Collins Ome

The Final Reckoning

Reference

Harper-Collins India

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Books by DORIS LESSING