Martha Quest - Softcover

Lessing, Doris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586089985 ISBN 13: 9780586089989

Publisher: Flamingo, 1996

Synopsis

The opening book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s ‘Children of Violence’ series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.

When we first meet Martha Quest, she is a girl of fifteen living with her parents on a poor African farm. She is eager for life and resentful of the deadening narrowness of home, and escapes to take a job as a typist in the local capital. Here, in the ‘big city’, she encounters the real life she was so eager to know and understand. As a picture of colonial life, ‘Martha Quest’ succeeds by the depth of its realism alone; but always at its centre is Martha, a sympathetic figure drawn with unrelenting objectivity.

Martha’s Africa is Doris Lessing’s Africa: the restrictive life of the farm; the atmosphere of racial fear and antagonism; the superficial sophistication of the city. And both Martha and Lessing are Children of Violence: the generation that was born of one world war and came of age in another, whose abrasive relationships with their parents, with one another, and with society are laid bare brilliantly by a writer who understands them better than any other.

About this title

About the Author

Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She died in 2013.

From the Back Cover

'SHE LOOKED ACROSS THE FIELD TO THE DUMFRIES HILLS AND RE-FASHIONED THAT UNUSED COUNTRY TO THE SCALE OF HER IMAGINATION. THERE AROSE, OVER THE HARSH SCRUB AND THE STUNTED TREES, A NOBLE CITY, SET FOURSQUARE AND COLONNADED, ITS CITIZENS GRAVE AND BEAUTIFUL, BLACK AND WHITE TOGETHER.'

The 'Children of Violence' series, a quintet of novels tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in Africa to a post-nuclear Britain of AD 2000, first established Doris Lessing as a great radical writer. In this first volume, Martha, the young rebellious daughter of a white family, finds her coming of age to be a great struggle for freedom and recognition. Intelligent and deeply compassionate, she sees the unpalatable political and social realities of her world with an extraordinary clarity. Martha's vision of a just society takes her beyond the impoverished and rigid farming community to the city – an ill-matched marriage her means of escape…

“Stubborn, resilient, wry towards herself, Martha is Doris Lessing's most satisfying and complex characterisation. She is a child of her times, of violence, who "could no more dissociate herself from the violence done by her than a tadpole can live out of water"”
THE TIMES

“With deceptive simplicity, Doris Lessing reveals more about the private depths of the mind and soul than perhaps one ought to know”
DAILY TELEGRAPH

“'Martha Quest' is a deeply felt and powerfully written account of a modern woman's progress.”
SUNDAY TIMES

Edition details

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0586089985
• ISBN 13: 9780586089989
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352