The Sweetest Dream - Softcover

Lessing, Doris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060937556 ISBN 13: 9780060937553

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2003

Synopsis

Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in her most involving, most personal, most political novel for some years It’s the morning of the Sixties and it’s suppertime at Freedom Hall, the most welcoming household in North London. Frances Lennox stands at her stove, bringing another feast to readiness before ladling it out to the motley, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table – here are her two sons, smarting at their upbringing but beginning to absorb their mother’s lessons. Around them are ranged their schoolfriends and girlfriends and ex-friends and new friends fresh off the street. The feast begins. Wine and talk flow. Everything is being changed and being challenged. And here in this kitchen, the nutritious tolerance can be sniffed. But what is being tolerated? And where will it end? Over there in the corner is Frances’ ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, who delivers his rousing tirades, then laps up the adolescent adulation while he laps up his soup, before disappearing into the night to evade the clutches of his responsibilities. Upstairs sits Johnny’s exiled mother, funding all, but finding she can embrace only one lost little girl – Sylvia, who has to travel to Africa, to freshly, fervently independent Zimlia, to find out who she is and what she wants. And, yes, what of the Africans, what will they tolerate? These are the people dreaming the Sixties into being and the people who on the morning after all that dreaming, woke to find they were the ones taxed with clearing up and making good. No living novelist in Britain is in a better position than Doris Lessing to look at what the world did in that eventful decade. And perhaps no-one else has better expressed the difference between the male experience of the 1960s and what followed and the female experience of the same thing than she has here in The Sweetest Dream.

About this title

Product Description:

Frances Lennox ladles out dinner every night to the motley, exuberant, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable tableher two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends, and ftesh-off-the-street friends. It's the early 1960s and certainly "everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." Except financial circumstances demand that Frances and her sons Eve with her proper ex-mother-in-law. And her ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, has just dumped his second wife's problem child at Frances's feet. And the world's political landscape has suddenly become surreal beyond imagination....

Set against the backdrop of the decade that changed the world forever, The Sweetest Dream is a riveting look at a group of people who dared to dream-and faced the inevitable cleanup afterward -- from one of the greatest writers of our time.

Review:

"Irresistibly alluring . [THE SWEETEST DREAM is] one of Lessing's most generous works." -- Book Magazine

"Lessing's most engrossing novel in many years." -- London Times Literary Supplement

"[THE SWEETEST DREAM] is a beautifully made book."--Financial Times [London]

"Irresistibly alluring ... [THE SWEETEST DREAM is] one of Lessing's most generous works."--Book Magazine

"Lessing's most engrossing novel in many years."--London Times Literary Supplement

"Lessing's sage, level gaze is everywhere bought to bear ... [THE SWEETEST DREAM] is solidly wrought, deeply felt."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[Lessing's] acute political and artistic awareness makes her vision of our time rich and almost always freshly perceptive."--The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

"A great story with a Dickensian cast of memorable characters"--Evening Standard

Lessing s sage, level gaze is everywhere bought to bear [THE SWEETEST DREAM] is solidly wrought, deeply felt. --Publishers Weekly (starred review)"

Irresistibly alluring [THE SWEETEST DREAM is] one of Lessing s most generous works. --Book Magazine"

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0060937556
• ISBN 13: 9780060937553
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 479