In a beleaguered city where rats and roving gangs terrorize the streets, where government has broken down and meaningless violence holds sway, a woman -- middle-aged and middle-class -- is brought a twelve-year-old girl and told that it is her responsibility to raise the child. This book, which the author has called "an attempt at autobiography," is that woman's journal -- a glimpse of a future only slightly more horrendous than our present, and of the forces that alone can save us from total destruction.
WINNER
| 2007 Nobel Prize
"One of her profoundest visionary excursions." --Gail Godwin, Chicago Tribune Book World
"An extraordinary and compelling meditation about the enduring need for loyalty, love and responsibility." --Time
"A brilliant fable." --Maureen Howard, front page, The New York Times Book Review
"Doris Lessing again presents herself as one of the most intelligent of all modern novelists." --Philadelphia Bulletin
"The most fluid and suggestive of all her books." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"A short, easily read novel...part science fiction and part 19th-century realism, its effect is profoundly affecting and mystical... especially moving for those who have responded to Lessing's previous work." --Houston Chronicle
"A major work, one that well proves her vigor, originality and importance as a novelist." --Cleveland Free Press
In a beleaguered city where rats and roving gangs terrorize the streets, where government has broken down and meaningless violence holds sway, a woman -- middle-aged and middle-class -- is brought a twelve-year-old girl and told that it is her responsibility to raise the child. This book, which the author has called "an attempt at autobiography," is that woman's journal -- a glimpse of a future only slightly more horrendous than our present, and of the forces that alone can save us from total destruction.
Awards
WINNER
| 2007 Nobel Prize
Praise
"One of her profoundest visionary excursions." --Gail Godwin, Chicago Tribune Book World
"An extraordinary and compelling meditation about the enduring need for loyalty, love and responsibility." --Time
"A brilliant fable." --Maureen Howard, front page, The New York Times Book Review
"Doris Lessing again presents herself as one of the most intelligent of all modern novelists." --Philadelphia Bulletin
"The most fluid and suggestive of all her books." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"A short, easily read novel...part science fiction and part 19th-century realism, its effect is profoundly affecting and mystical... especially moving for those who have responded to Lessing's previous work." --Houston Chronicle
"A major work, one that well proves her vigor, originality and importance as a novelist." --Cleveland Free Press
