This is the first volume of Doris Lessing's Collected African Stories. A classic work of twentieth-century literature. 'It can be said of all white-dominated Africa that it was -- and still is -- the Old Chief's Country. So all the stories I write of a certain kind I think of as belonging under that heading; tales about white people, sometimes about black people, living in a landscape that not so very long ago was settled by black tribes, living in complex societies that the white people are only just beginning to study, let alone understand.' Doris Lessing, from the Preface. In this superb volume of African stories, Doris Lessing paints a magnificent portrait of the country in which she grew up. The cruelties of the white man towards the native, 'the amorphous black mass, like tadpoles, faceless, who existed merely to serve', the English settlers, ill at ease, the gamblers and moneymakers searching for diamonds and gold, and the presence, 'latent always in the blood', of Africa itself, its majestic beauty and timeless landscape: Doris Lessing draws them all together into a powerful, memorable vision.

This Was the Old Chief's Country

Literature & Fiction

DORIS LESSING

Short Stories & Anthologies

Flamingo

The Sun Between Their Feet (Collected African Stories)

Contemporary

Hardback 50th Anniversary Edition Doris Lessing brought the manuscript of THE GRASS IS SINGING, her classic first novel, with her when she left Southern Rhodesia and came to England in 1950. When it was first published it created an impact whose reverberations we are still feeling, and immediately established itself as a landmark in twentieth-century literature. This hardback edition is to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its publication.

The Grass Is Singing

A beautifully produced edition of a new cat tale from Doris Lessing. A new short story from Doris Lessing about an awkwardly loveable old cat, to be produced as a beautiful small-format giftish hardback for the cat-loving part of the Christmas market.

The Old Age of El Magnifico

Particularly Cats

This much-acclaimed collection of stories vividly evokes both the grandeur of Africa, the glare of its sun and the wide open space, as well as the great, irresolvable tensions between whites and blacks. Tales of poor white farmers and their lonely wives, of storm air thick with locusts, of ants and pomegranate trees, black servants and the year of hunger in a native village - all combine to present a powerful image of a continent which seems incorruptible in spite of the people who plough, mine and plunder it to make their living. In Doris Lessing's own words, 'Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.'

The Sun Between Their Feet

An essential and definitive collection of the Nobel Prize for Literature winner's finest essays, reviews, reminiscences and interviews from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. 'The novelist talks as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice. In an age of committee art, public art, people may begin to feel again a need for the small personal voice; and this will feed confidence into writers and, with confidence because of the knowledge of being needed, the warmth and humanity, and love of people which is essential for a great age of literature.' In this collection of her non-fiction, Lessing's own life and work are the subject of a number of pieces, as are fellow writers such as Isak Dinesen and Kurt Vonnegut. There are essays on Malcolm X and Sufism, discussions of the responsibility of the artist, thoughts on her exile from Southern Rhodesia, and a fascinating memoir of her fraught relationship with her mother. Lit throughout by Doris Lessing's desire for truth-telling, 'A Small Personal Voice' is both an important collection of writings by and a self-portrait of one of the most significant writers of the past century.

A Small Personal Voice

The Sweetest Dream

Genre Fiction

First published by Michael Joseph in 1984, under a pseudonym, as 'The Diary of a Good Neighbour' and 'If the Old Could!', now published as 'The Diaries of Jane Somers', this is in many ways classic Lessing. As resonant with social and political themes as 'The Golden Notebook', Lessing returns to the realism of her early fiction with the wisdom and experience of maturity. The diaries introduce us to Jane, an intelligent and beautiful magazine editor concerned with success, clothes and comfort. But her real inadequacy is highlighted when first her husband, then her mother, die from cancer and Jane feels strangely removed. In an attempt to fill this void, she befriends ninety-something Maudie, whose poverty and squalor contrast so radically with the glamour and luxury of the magazine world. The two gradually come to depend on each other -- Maudie delighting Jane with tales of London in the 1920s and Jane trying to care for the rapidly deteriorating old woman. 'The Diary of Jane Somers' contrasts the helplessness of the elderly with that of the young as Jane is forced to care for her nineteen-year-old drop-out niece Kate who is struggling with an emotional breakdown. Jane realises that she understands young people as little as she so recently did the old.

The Diaries of Jane Somers

Spine creased, page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

The Golden Notebook

Harper-perennial

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Books by DORIS LESSING