The Summer Before the Dark (Vintage International) - Softcover

Lessing, Doris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307390624 ISBN 13: 9780307390622

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009

Synopsis

Nobel laureate Doris Lessing's classic novel of the pivotal summer in one woman's life is a brilliant excursion into the terrifying gulf between youth and old age.

As the summer begins, Kate Brown--attractive, intelligent, forty-five, happily married, with a house in the London suburbs and three grown children--has no reason to expect that anything will change. But by summer's end the woman she was--living behind a protective camouflage of feminine charm and caring--no longer exists. The Summer Before the Dark takes us along on Kate's journey: from London to Turkey to Spain, from husband to lover to madness, on the road to a frightening new independence and a confrontation with herself that lets her finally and truly come of age.

About this title

Review

"A masterpiece. . . . Probably the best book she has written."
--The Economist

"A splendid and serious novel that reminds one once again of just how much the fictive imagination can order and enrich experience."
--The National Observer

"We are caught up in a rush of strong feeling. . . . Lessing's prose has the nervous intensity and quick, impressionistic lightness of some of D.H. Lawrence's later work."
--Newsweek

About the Author

Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia, in 1919, and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books--novels, stories, reportage, poems, and plays. In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0307390624
• ISBN 13: 9780307390622
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288