Adore (13 page)

Intelligent, sensitive, and fiercely passionate, Martha Quest is a young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood. She is a romantic idealistic in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the fullest with every nerve, emotion, and instinct laid bare to experience. For her, this is a time of solitary reading, daydreams, dancing—and the first disturbing encounters with sex.
Martha Quest
is the first novel in Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece in its own right and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

A PROPER MARRIAGE

An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a failing marriage. Finally, she must
make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security.

A Proper Marriage
is the second novel in the Children of Violence series.

A RIPPLE FROM THE STORM

Martha Quest, the heroine of the Children of Violence series, has been acclaimed as one of the greatest fictional creations in the English language. In
A Ripple from the Storm
, Doris Lessing charts Martha Quest's personal and political adventures in race-torn British Africa, following Martha through World War II, a grotesque second marriage, and an excursion into Communism. This wise and starling novel perceptively reveals the paradoxes, passions, and ironies rooted in the life of twentieth-century Anglo-Africa.

A Ripple from the Storm
is the third novel in the Children of Violence series.

LANDLOCKED

In the aftermath of World War II, Martha Quest finds herself completely disillusioned. She is losing faith in the Communist movement in Africa, and her marriage to one of the movement's leaders is disintegrating. Determined to resist the erosion of her personality, she engages in her first satisfactory love affair and breaks free, if only momentarily, from her suffocating unhappiness.

Landlocked
is the fourth novel in the Children of Violence series.

THE FOUR-GATED CITY

Now middle-aged, Martha Quest moves
to London, where she lives through many of the great social and political movements of the second half of the twentieth century. In Lessing's chilling rendition, though, that century ends with the nuclear decimation of World War III.

The Four-Gated City
is the fifth and final novel in the Children of Violence series.

 

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“Lessing sets the scene instantly, viscerally, and explores the folds and recesses of character with astonishing economy.”

—
Boston Globe

“[Lessing] has a seismographer's feel for the fissures beneath the surface of family and for the tension between personal yearning and society's conventions.”

—
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Intensely readable. . . . [Lessing] offers startling perspectives on domesticity and desire.”

—
O, The Oprah Magazine

“Powerful . . . beautifully realized.”

—
Miami Herald

“A keen sociological eye for class and ideology; an understanding of the contradictory impulses of the human heart; an ability to conjure a place, a mood, and a time through seemingly matter-of-fact descriptions.”

—Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times

“Stunning . . . showing Lessing's trademark incisiveness.”

—
Vogue

“Lessing is an incisive chronicler of our times and a wickedly honest storyteller.”

—
New Orleans Times-Picayune

“At once intimately detailed yet infinitely expansive in the suggestions of a lost world only recoverable by a profoundly observant writer . . . showing [Lessing] at the top of her very impressive form.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Brilliantly written. . . . Lessing is at the top of her game.”

—
Library Journal
(starred)

 

 

 

 

Cover art used courtesy of Exclusive Media and © Exclusive Media.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Originally published as “The Grandmothers” in the collection
The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels
in hardcover in the United States in 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers.

P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

A
DORE
. Copyright © 2013 by Doris Lessing. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-231896-1
EPub Edition September 2013 ISBN 9780062318978

13 14 15 16 17
OV/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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