The Summer Before the Dark - Softcover

Lessing, Doris May

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0394710959 ISBN 13: 9780394710952

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1983

Synopsis

As the summer begins, Kate Brown -- attractive, intelligent, forty five, happily enough married, with a house in the London suburbs and three grown children -- has no reason to expect anything will change. But when the summer ends, the woman she was -- living behind a protective camouflage of feminine charm and caring -- no longer exists. This novel. Doris Lessing's brilliant excursion into the terrifying stretch of time between youth and old age, is her 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 self that lets her, finally, come truly of age.

About this title

Review:

‘This is probably the best book Doris Lessing has ever written. It would be a deprivation not to read it at once.’ Economist

‘An honest, perceptive, serious book.’ Irish Times

‘Painfully, poignantly authentic.’ David Lodge, New Statesman

‘A summer journey of self-discovery which ends amazingly, in an act of self-definition so searching, so acute and total, one puts down the book shaken, enlarged, in awe. It is an ostensibly simple story, simply told, developing all the way and deepening: the particular universalised in a narrative of compelling power. No wonder Mrs Lessing has been spoken of in the same breath as Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn.’ Sunday Times

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.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0394710959
• ISBN 13: 9780394710952
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback