The Summer Before the Dark

Description

A middle-aged woman's search for freedom, this is classic Lessing, here given a stunning new image. Her four children have flown, her husband is otherwise occupied, and after twenty years of being a good wife and mother, Kate Brown is free for a summer of adventure. She plunges into an affair with a younger man, travelling abroad with him, and on her return to England, meets an extraordinary young woman whose charm and freedom of spirit encourages Kate in her own liberation. Kate's new life has brought her a strange unhappiness, but as the summer months unfold, a darker, disquieting journey begins, devastating in its consequences.

Doris Lessing is one of the most radical, provocative and diverse writers of the modern age. 'A major figure in twentieth century literature, her labours and prodigious output have helped to change the way we see ourselves.' Michele Roberts, New Statesman

'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