Doris Lessing

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Doris Lessing's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    53 Books - 1 Series
  • First Book:
    May 1967
  • Latest Book:
    June 2019
  • Rating:

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

  • Particularly Cats
  • A Proper Marriage

    "

    ""A totally modern work. Martha Quest is, above all, ironically percieved by the author in whose hands irony is an instrument of compassion."" — New Republic

    An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha...

  • Briefing for a Descent into Hell

    A fascinating look inside the mind of a man who is supposedly "mad." Professor Charles Watkins of Cambridge University is a patient at a mental hospital where the doctors try with increasing drugs to bring his mind under control. But Watkins has emba...

  • 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-fiv...

  • 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

    A variety of narratives, including the report of Johor (George Sherban)--the Emissary sent by the Powers controlling our part of the universe--reveal what the planet Shikasta and its inhabitants have, in desperation, endured...

  • 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

    "

    ""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."" — Bar...

  • 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

    "

    One of the most important books of the growing feminist movement of the 1950s, it was brought to a wider public by the Nobel Prize award to Doris Lessing in 2007. Authoress Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writer''s block by writing a comprehensive...

  • 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

    A group of squatters rebel against Mrs Thatcher and erupt into violence in this politicised novel from the author of ''The Golden Notebook''.In a London squat a band of bourgeois revolutionaries are united by a loathing of the waste and cruelty they ...

  • 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

    The stories and sketches in this collection penetrate to the heart of human experience with the passion and intelligence readers have come to expect of Doris Lessing. Most of the piece are set in contemporary London, a city the author loves for it...



  • London Observed

  • Landlocked

    In the aftermath of World War II, Martha Quest finds herself completely disillusioned. She is losing faith with the communist movement in Africa, and her marriage to one of the movement's leaders is disintegrating. Determined to resist the erosion of...

  • A Ripple from the Storm

    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 o...

  • 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

    Thousands of years in the future, all the northern hemisphere is buried under the ice and snow of a new Ice Age. At the southern end of a large landmass called Ifrik, two children of the Mahondi people, seven-year old Mara and her younger brother,...

  • Ben, in the World

    At eighteen, Ben is in the world, but not of it. He is too large, too awkward, too inhumanly made. Now estranged from his family, he must find his own path in life. From London and the south of France to Brazil and the mountains of the Andes. Ben...

  • Martha Quest

    Intelligent, sensitive, and fiercely passionate, Martha Quest is a young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood. She is a romantic idealistic in revolt against the puritan snobbery...

  • The Sweetest Dream

    Frances Lennox ladles out dinner every night to the motley, exuberant, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable tableher two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends, and ftesh-off-the-street friends. It's the early 1960s and certainly...

  • 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 condition

    In the title novel, two friends fall in love with each other's teenage sons, and these p...

  • 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...

  • 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

    In Pursuit of the English is a novelist's account of a lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous, funny, pathetic, full-blooded life in a working-class rooming house. It is a shrewd and unsentimental picture of Londoners you've probably never met or even read...

  • 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

  • On Cats

  • Winter in July

  • Under My Skin

    • / General Fiction
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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 June 2019.

The first book by Doris Lessing, Particularly Cats, was published in May 1967.

Yes. Doris Lessing has 1 series.
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