Doris Lessing

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Doris Lessing's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    53 Books (1 Series)
  • First Book:
    November -0001
  • Latest Book:
    September 2021
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Full Series List in Order

The Children of Violence

3 - A Ripple from the Storm (Oct-1995)
4 - Landlocked (Oct-1995)
5 - The Four-Gated City (Jun-1980)
A Proper Marriage (Nov-1969)

Book List in Order: 53 titles

  • Under My Skin

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy

  • Particularly Cats

  • A Proper Marriage

    The Children of Violence

    An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a failing marriage. Finally, she must make ...

  • Briefing for a Descent into Hell

    A fascinating look inside the mind of a man who is supposedly "mad."...

  • The Grass Is Singing

    Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and a beautifully understated social critique. Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, ...

  • The Summer Before the Dark

    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 ...

  • A Small Personal Voice

  • The Memoirs of a Survivor

    In a beleaguered city where rats and roving gangs terrorize the streets, where government has broken down and meaningless violence holds sway, a woman -- middle-aged and middle-class -- is brought a twelve-year-old girl and told that it is her respon...

  • African Stories

    Long considered Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s best collection of short stories, African Stories -- a central book in the work of a truly beloved writer -- is now back in print. This beautiful collection is an homage to her twenty-five years sp...



  • Man and Two Women

  • Stories

    This wide-ranging collection of the stories by the renowned Nobel Laureate--spanning more than two decades of her astonishing career--highlights her singular gifts for portraying the complex lives of men and women in a modern, often alienating world....

  • Shikasta

    The first volume in the Canopus in Argos: Archives series is presented as a compilation of documents, reports, letters, speeches and journal entries, and purports to be a general study of the planet Shikasta"clearly the planet Earth"to be used ...

  • The Temptation of Jack Orkney

    From Doris Lessing, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, one of her finest collections of short stories. Doris Lessing is unrivalled in her ability to capture the truth from the complexities of relationships and the stories in this wonderful co...

  • The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five

  • The Four-Gated City

    The Children of Violence - 5

    "I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way, and it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do." --  Barbara King...

  • The Sirian Experiments

    The third volume of Lessing's visionary series is the first-person account of Ambien II, a female ruler of the Sirian empire who slowly realizes how sophisticated the Canopus empire is and attempts to effect a similar society...

  • Canopus in Argos

  • The Golden Notebook

    "The Golden Notebook is Doris Lessing's most important work and has left its mark upon the ideas and feelings of a whole generation of women."  --  New York Times Book ReviewAnna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who n...

  • The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

    Planet 8, a prosperous world with intelligent, vital inhabitants, is transformed by an Ice Age, a change that causes a critical variation in lifestyle and a drastic reappraisal of the meaning and value of life...



  • The Habit of Loving

  • Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

    From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the fifth and final instalment in the visionary novel cycle 'Canopus in Argos: Archives'. 'The Sentimental Agents ...' is set in the declining Volyen Empire as the empires of Sirius and Sh...

  • Sentimental Agents

    The fifth volume of the author's "Canopus in Argos" series focuses on the madness and false promise of words, rhetoric-induced delusion, as suffered by a young Canopean official in the small Volyen Empire...

  • The Diaries of Jane Somers

  • The Good Terrorist

    The Good Terrorist follows Alice Mellings, a woman who transforms her home into a headquarters for a group of radicals who plan to join the IRA. As Alice struggles to bridge her ideology and her bourgeois upbringing, her companions encounter unexpect...

  • To Room Nineteen

  • The Fifth Child

    Doris Lessing's contemporary gothic horror story -- centered on the birth of a baby who seems less than human -- probes society's unwillingness to recognize its own brutality.Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll o...

  • The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories

  • Five

  • The Black Madonna



  • The Real Thing

    "Doris Lessing has a powerful voice and a particular one. It speaks in anger at the distortion of personal relations ion a unsound society, but speaks it with a wit that manages to be both pitiless and compassionate."  --  Richard Eder, Los...

  • London Observed

  • Landlocked

    The Children of Violence - 4

    "Doris Lessing is the Cassandra of the documentary novel...crying for something harshly denied to our age: a longing for magic, for the irrational. Her concern for life, her independence of judgment and her gift for diagnosing our hydra-headed social...

  • A Ripple from the Storm

    The Children of Violence - 3

    Martha Quest, the embodied heroine of the Children of Violence series, has been acclaimed as one of the greatest fictional creations in the English language. In a Ripple from the Storm, Doris Lessing charts Martha Quest's personal and political adven...

  • Going Home

    "Africa belongs to the Africans; the sooner they take it back the better. But -- a country also belongs to those who feel at home in it. Perhaps it may be that love of Africa the country will be strong enough to link people who hate each other now. P...

  • Love, Again

    Widowed for many years, with grown children, sixty-five-year-old Sarah Durham is a writer who works in the theater in London. When she falls in love with a seductive young actor, the beautiful and androgynous twenty-eight-year-old Bill, and then with...

  • Mara and Dann

    "Tenderly perceptive....A resounding affirmation of humanity and what it holds dearest, from one of our most gifted storytellers." --  Publishers Weekly (starred review)Thousands of years in the future, all the northern hemisphere is buried unde...

  • Ben, in the World

    Far from resting on her laurels, Lessing goes from strength to strength. Ben's half-human ignorance, paranoia, and rage are magnificently imagined and vividly present on every page. The condition of the outsider has hardly ever before in fiction been...

  • Martha Quest

    "I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do."   --  B...

  • The Sweetest Dream

    “[Lessing] is a pro, writing at the top of her powers, realistically, passionately, accessibly…. a stirring novel” -- San Francisco ChronicleFrances Lennox stands at her stove, bringing another feast to readiness before ladling it out to the yo...



  • A Home for the Highland Cattle and The Antheap

    Doris Lessing's two short novels A Home for the Highland Cattle, a wry portrait of African settler society, and The Antheap, set in the gold fields of the former Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), were originally published in Five (1953), a collection...

  • The Grandmothers

    Shocking, intimate, often uncomfortably honest, these stories reaffirm Doris Lessing’s unequalled ability to capture the truth of the human conditionIn the title novel, two friends fall in love with each other's teenage sons, and these passions las...

  • Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

    In her visionary novel Mara and Dann (published in 1999), Doris Lessing introduced us to a brother and sister battling through a future landscape where the climate is much changed -- colder than ever before in the north and unbearably dry and hot in ...

  • The Cleft

    In the last years of his life, a Roman senator embarks on one final epic endeavor, a retelling of the history of human creation. The story he relates is the little-known saga of the Clefts, an ancient community of women with no knowledge of nor need ...

  • Alfred and Emily

    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 i...

  • On Cats

  • Time Bites

    In this collection of the very best of Doris Lessing's essays, we are treated to the wisdom and keen insight of a writer who has learned, over the course of a brilliant career spanning more than half a century, to read the world differently. From ...

  • In Pursuit of the English

    "One of the most authentic books ever written about the English....Funny, touching and so real that the smell and taste of London seem to rise from its pages."  --  San Francisco ChronicleIn Pursuit of the English is a novelist's account of...

  • The Sun between Their Feet

  • This Was the Old Chief's Country



  • Play With a Tiger and Other Plays

  • Adore

    Two friends, two sons, two shocking and intense love affairs . . . Roz and Lil have been best friends since childhood. But their bond stretches beyond familiar bounds when these middle-aged mothers fall in love with each other's teenage sons -- ta...

  • Adoration

  • Winter in July

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Doris Lessing has published 53 books.

Doris Lessing does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Winter in July, was published in September 2021.

The first book by Doris Lessing, Under My Skin, was published in November -0001.

Yes. Doris Lessing has 1 series.
Author Series
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