Alfred And Emily

Doris Lessing

ISBN 10: 0007233450 / ISBN 13: 9780007233458

Published by Fourth Estate, 2008

About this Item

First edition first impression hardback, 2008, with unclipped jacket. In overall fine condition (dust jacket now protected). Binding tight and appears almost unopened. Internally clean, no annotation or inscriptions; text bright and clear throughout. Not an old library book.

Seller Inventory # 220004

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Alfred And Emily
• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0007233450
• ISBN 13: 9780007233458
• Binding: Hardback
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Auto/Biography

About this title

Synopsis

The first book after Doris’ Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead.

'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.'

In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In the first half of this book, Doris Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war at all, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester as children but leading separate lives. This is followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came to be in the shadow of that war, their move to Rhodesia, a damaged couple squatting over Doris's childhood in a strange land.

'Here I still am,' says Doris Lessing, 'trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.' With the publication of Alfred and Emily she has done just that.

About the Author

Doris Lessing was the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature and is one of the most important writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Her first novel, ‘The Grass is Singing’ was published in 1950, and since then her international reputation has flourished. Among her other celebrated novels are ‘The Golden Notebook’, ‘The Summer Before the Dark’, and ‘Memoirs of a Survivor’. Her most recent works include two volumes of autobiography, ‘Under my Skin’ and ‘Walking in the Shade’, her most recent novel is ‘The Cleft’.