Adore (12 page)

BEN, IN THE WORLD

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 how he fares in it, will horrify and captivate until the novel's dramatic finale.

LOVE, AGAIN

Love, Again
tells the story of a sixty-five-year-old woman who falls in love and struggles to maintain her sanity. Widowed for many years, with grown children, Sarah is a writer who works in the theater in London. During the production of a play, she falls in love with a seductive young actor, the beautiful and androgynous twenty-eight-year-old Bill, and then with the more mature thirty-five-year-old director Henry. Finding herself in a state of longing and desire that she had thought was the province of younger women, Sarah is compelled to explore and examine her own personal history of love, from her earliest childhood desires to her most recent obsessions. The result is a brilliant anatomy of love from a master of human psychology who remains one of the most daring writers of fiction at work today.

UNDER MY SKIN: VOLUME ONE OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TO 1949

The experiences absorbed through these “skins too few” are evoked in this memoir of Doris Lessing's childhood and youth as the daughter of a British colonial family in Persia and Southern Rhodesia. Honestly and with overwhelming immediacy, Lessing maps the growth of her consciousness, her sexuality, and her politics.
Under My Skin
, winner of
the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, offers a rare opportunity to discover the forces that shaped one of the most distinguished writers of our time.

WALKING IN THE SHADE: VOLUME TWO OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY—1949–1962

The second volume of Doris Lessing's extraordinary autobiography covers the years 1949–62, from her arrival in war-weary London with her son, Peter, and the manuscript for her first novel,
The Grass Is Singing
, under her arm, to the publication of her most famous work of fiction,
The Golden Notebook
. She describes how communism dominated the intellectual life of the 1950s and how she, like nearly all communists, became disillusioned with extreme and rhetorical politics and left communism behind. Evoking the bohemian days of a young writer and single mother, Lessing speaks openly about her writing process, her friends and lovers, her involvement in the theater, and her political activities.

THE REAL THING: STORIES AND SKETCHES

The stories and sketches in this collection penetrate to the heart of human experience with the passion and intelligence readers have come to expect of Doris Lessing. Most of the pieces are set in contemporary London, a city the author loves for its variety, its diversity, its transitoriness, the way it connects the life of animals and birds in the parks to the streets. Lessing's fiction also explores the darker corners of relationships between women and men, as in the rich and emotionally complex title story, in which she uncovers a more parlous
reality behind the facade of the most conventional relationship between the sexes.

AFRICAN LAUGHTER

Based on her memories of growing up in Southern Rhodesia and the experiences of four visits to Zimbabwe in the 1980s and 1990s,
African Laughter
is Lessing's poignant study of the homeland from which she was exiled for twenty-five years. With rich detail and intimate understanding, she tackles the role that changing racial and social dynamics, the onslaught of AIDS, political corruption, and ecological factors have played in Zimbabwe's evolution from colonial territory to modern nation.

PRISONS WE CHOOSE TO LIVE INSIDE: ESSAYS

With her signature candor and clarity, Lessing explores new ways to view ourselves and the society we live in, and gives us fresh answers to such enduring questions as how to think for ourselves and how to understand what we know.

IN PURSUIT OF THE ENGLISH: A DOCUMENTARY

In Pursuit of the English
is a novelist's account of a lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous, funny, pathetic, full-blooded life in a working-class rooming house. It is a shrewd and unsentimental picture of Londoners you've probably never met or even read about—though they are the real English.

The truth of her perception shines through the pages of a work that is a brilliant piece of cultural interpretation, an intriguing memoir and a thoroughly engaging read.

GOING HOME: A MEMOIR

Going Home
is Doris Lessing's account of her first journey back to Africa, the land in which she grew up and in which so much of her emotion and her concern are still invested. Returning to Southern Rhodesia in 1956, she found that her love of Africa had remained as strong as her hatred of the idea of “white supremacy” espoused by its ruling class.
Going Home
evokes brilliantly the experience of the people, black and white, who have shaped and will shape a beloved country.

MARTHA QUEST