A study of a man beyond the verge of a nervous breakdown, this is a brilliant and disturbing novel by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

A fascinating look inside the mind of a man who is supposedly "mad."

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.

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.

In this ambitious novel of madness and release, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Doris Lessing imagines the fantastical "inner-space" life of an amnesiac.Charles Watkins, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, has suffered a breakdown, confined to a mental hospital as his friends and doctors attempt to bring him back to reality. But Watkins has embarked on a tremendous pyschological adventure that takes him from a spinning raft in the Atlantic to a ruined stone city on a tropical island to an outer-space journey through singing planets. As he travels in his mind through memory and the farther reaches of imagination, his doctors try to subdue him with ever more powerful drugs in a competition for his soul. In this provocative novel, Lessing takes us on a harrowing voyage into the rarely glimpsed territory of the inner mind.

The fifth and final book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s ‘Children of Violence’ series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.

In this provocative, classic metaphysical thriller, a group of suburban amateur actors plagued by personal demons and terrors explore the pathways to heaven and hell Certain inhabitants of Battle Hill, a small community on the outskirts of London, are preparing to mount a new play by the neighborhood’s most illustrious resident, the writer Peter Stanhope. Each actor struggles with self-absorption, doubt, fear, and sin. But “the Hill” is not like other places. Here the past and present intermingle, ghosts walk among the living, and reality is often clouded by dreams and the dark fantastic. For young Pauline Anstruther, who is caring for an aging grandmother and frightened by the specter of a doppelgänger who gets closer with each visitation, the prospect of heaven exists in the renowned playwright’s willingness to bear the burden of her terror. For eminent historian Lawrence Wentworth, the rejection of his desire pulls him deeper inside himself, leaving him vulnerable to the lure of the succubus and opening wide the entrance to hell. A brilliant theological thriller, Descent into Hell is an extraordinary fictional meditation on sin and personal salvation by one of the twentieth century’s most original and provocative literary artists. Charles Williams, a member of the Inklings alongside fellow Oxfordians C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield, has written a powerful work at once profoundly disturbing and gloriously uplifting, an ingenious amalgam of metaphysics, religious thought, and darkest fantasy.

A leading English historian presents a satirical novel in which the poet, gardener, and space traveller, Oi Paz, arrives to take possession of Earth and falls victim to terrestrial bureaucrats and other fumblers.

'The Sirian Experiments' is the third volume in Doris Lessing's celebrated space fiction series, 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'. In this interlinked quintet of novels, she creates a new, extraordinary cosmos where the fate of the Earth is influenced by the rivalries and interactions of three powerful galactic empires, Canopus, Sirius and their enemy, Puttiora. 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. 'The Sirian Experiments' chronicles the origins of our planet, as the three galactic empires fight for control of the human race. The novel charts the gradual moral awakening of its narrator, Ambien II, a 'dry, dutiful, efficient' female Sirian administrator. Witnessing the wanton colonization of land and people, Ambien begins to question her involvement in such insidious experimentati- on, her faith in the possibility of human progress itself growing weaker every day.

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