The Grandmothers

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“Here is yet more evidence that this writer of enormous insight and prodigious talent should have won the Nobel Prize decades ago.” — Chicago TribuneShocking, intimate, often uncomfortably honest, these stories reaffirm Doris Lessing’s unequalled ability to capture the truth of the human condition.In the title novel, two friends fall in love with each other’s teenage sons, and these passions last for years, until the women end them, vowing a respectable old age. In Victoria and the Staveneys, a young woman gives birth to a child of mixed race and struggles with feelings of estrangement as her daughter gets drawn into a world of white privilege. The Reason for It traces the birth, faltering, and decline of an ancient culture, with enlightening modern resonances. A Love Child features a World War II soldier who believes he has fathered a love child during a fleeting wartime romance and cannot be convinced otherwise.

In the title novel, two friends fall in love with each other’s teenage sons, and these passions last for years, until the women end them, vowing a respectable old age. In Victoria and the Staveneys, a young woman gives birth to a child of mixed race and struggles with feelings of estrangement as her daughter gets drawn into a world of white privilege. The Reason for It traces the birth, faltering, and decline of an ancient culture, with enlightening modern resonances. A Love Child features a World War II soldier who believes he has fathered a love child during a fleeting wartime romance and cannot be convinced otherwise.

“[Lessing] has never written better.” “A LOVE CHILD possesses both a palpable immediacy and a haunting afterlife.” “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.” “Absorbing … vivid and fresh … Lessing again demonstrates her remarkable social ventriloquism, an ability to convincingly project her voice into a disparate range of milieus and characters.” “Using fiction to explore the conditions of our lives in realms both public and private, Lessing anchors the self in the world and returns the world to the self. In this, she is a daughter of Dickens, of Zola, of Stendhal: profoundly radical and traditional at once, in the best sense of each word.” “Here is yet more evidence that this writer of enormous insight and prodigious talent should have won the Nobel Prize decades ago.” “Intensely readable … [Lessing] offers startling perspectives on domesticity and desire.” “Lessing’s scathing intelligence ranges widely… each [short novel ] unfolds over decades, tracking with dispassionate precision how youthful notions come to define, even defeat, a life.” “Stunning … showing Lessing’s trademark incisiveness.” “[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.” “Lessing is without peer.” “Doris Lessing is a compelling storyteller with a fierce intelligence, a keen ear for hypocricy and a sure grasp of history’s cruel ironies.” “At once intimately detailed yet infinitely expansive in their suggestions of a lost world only recoverable by a profoundly observant writer ….Showing [Lessing] at the top of her very impressive form.” “Lessing has never been one to hide the truth, no matter how damning or devastating, and [THE GRANDMOTHERS] shows that her perceptions of the human condition have certainly not been dulled by age or by fame. She continues to be an incisive chronicler of our times and a wickedly honest storyteller.” “A brilliantly written book … Lessing is at the top of her game.” “[Lessing’s] acute political and artistic awareness makes her vision of our time rich and almost always freshly perceptive.” “Anyone who regards THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK as one of the key books of the mid-20th century will find this disconcerting novel worth attention.” “Powerful… beautifully realized.”

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