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

This collection brings together three of Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing’s most acclaimed novels.

Flip Lochner is a weary and disillusioned newspaper crime reporter. Curious to find out more about the origins of a casual acquaintance, he descends into Devil's Valley where, like Dante's Virgil, he encounters a bewildering array of mysterious characters and events that lead him to reevaluate the world in which he lives and which he thought he knew. Fusing invention and reality, magic realism and earthy humour, Lochner's adventures in the valley centre around the journey he undertakes to discover the truth about the elusive and erotic figure of Emma, one of Brink's most remarkable creations.

Essays of critical interpretation portray views of Doris Lessing's work, including The Golden Notebook, Marriages, and The Grass is Singing..

Doris Lessing's contemporary gothic horror story—centered on the birth of a baby who seems less than human—probes society's unwillingness to recognize its own brutality.Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll of domestic bliss in defiance of the social trends of late 1960s England. While around them crime and unrest surge, the Lovatts are certain that their old-fashioned contentment can protect them from the world outside—until the birth of their fifth baby. Gruesomely goblin-like in appearance, insatiably hungry, abnormally strong and violent, Ben has nothing innocent or infant-like about him. As he grows older and more terrifying, Harriet finds she cannot love him, David cannot bring himself to touch him, and their four older children are afraid of him. Understanding that he will never be accepted anywhere, Harriet and David are torn between their instincts as parents and their shocked reaction to this fierce and unlovable child whose existence shatters their belief in a benign world.

“Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the past 100 years, a shrewd visionary. . . . Her new, short, haunting novel . . . succors us with . . . unforgettable visual images. We shiver and marvel as we lose ourselves in time.”— The Times (London) In her visionary novel Mara and Dann, Doris Lessing introduced a brother and sister battling through a future landscape defined by extreme climates in the north and south. In this new novel the odyssey continues. Dann is grown up, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization, traveling with his friend, a snow dog who saves him from the depths of despair. Here, too, are Mara’s daughter and Griot with the green eyes, an abandoned child-soldier who discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories. Like its predecessor, this brilliant novel from one of our greatest living writers explains as much about our world as it does about the future we may be heading toward.

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook. Doris Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the first instalment in the visionary novel cycle 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'. The story of the final days of our planet is told through the reports of Johor, an emissary sent from Canopus. Earth, now named Shikasta (the Stricken) by the kindly, paternalistic Canopeans who colonised it many centuries ago, is under the influence of the evil empire of Puttiora. War, famine, disease and environmental disasters ravage the planet. To Johor, mankind is a 'totally crazed species', racing towards annihilation: his orders to save humanity set him what seems to be an impossible task. 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.

One day we had been well-off and secure; the old grey London house had been 'home' and we imagined that our lives . . . would continue to run smoothly forever. The next day it was all gone. For Anna Harcourt and her three daughters-lovely Helen, who always gets what she wants, young Jane, who makes the best of what she has, and Rosalie, the middle daughter who wavers somewhere in between-the world is turned upside down by their father's death and the discovery that they will have to sell their London home. The girls are shocked when Anna buys a cottage in Ryddelton, her home town in Scotland, but they soon settle in to Scottish life, each in her own way. As time passes, the three girls must contend with love and tragedy, hope and despair, laughter and tears, all unfolding with D.E. Stevenson's incomparable storytelling and knowledge of human nature. First published in 1958, Anna and Her Daughters is a compelling, poignant, and ultimately joyful tale of family, romance, and healing. This new edition includes an autobiographical sketch by the author. "Miss Stevenson has her own individual and charming way of seeing things." Western Mail

Close friendships are a heart-warming feature of many of our best-loved works of fiction. From Jane Eyre and Helen Burns' poignant schoolgirl relationship to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn's adventures on the Mississippi, fictional friends have supported, guided, comforted, nursed and at times betrayed the heroes and heroines of our popular and influential plays and novels. This book explores twenty-four literary friendships and, together with character studies and publication history, describes how each key relationship influences character, determines plot, promotes or disguises romance, preserves a reputation, sometimes results in betrayal, or underlines the theme of each literary work. It shows how authors from William Shakespeare to Elena Ferrante have by turns celebrated, lamented or transformed friendships throughout the ages, and how some friends - Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Holmes and Watson or even Bridget Jones and pals - have taken on creative lives beyond the bounds of their original narrative. Including a broad scope of literature spanning a period of 400 years from writers as diverse as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, John Steinbeck and Alice Walker, this book is the ideal gift for your literature-loving friend.