The Grandmothers: Victoria And The Staveneys; The Reason For It; A Love Child (SIGNED)
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 1st ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Signed with inscription
Four masterfully crafted novellas, bound together under the title The Grandmothers, present Doris Lessing at the height of her storytelling powers, dissecting the hidden currents of desire, family, and social expectation that run beneath the surface of ordinary lives. The title story chronicles an illicit and deeply unsettling relationship between two lifelong friends and the sons they have raised together, a transgression that forces a reckoning with the boundaries of love and loyalty, while Victoria and the Staveneys traces a young Black woman's entanglement with a well-meaning liberal family whose benevolence masks its own quiet cruelties. The Reason For It reaches back to a mythic, prehistoric community to illuminate how civilisations sow the seeds of their own destruction, and A Love Child resurrects the ghost of wartime passion through a soldier haunted by a woman and child he can never be certain existed. Lessing, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, brings her characteristic unsentimental precision to each of these tales, refusing easy resolutions and demanding that the reader sit with moral ambiguity. Her prose is spare yet charged, capable of compressing entire lifetimes and social histories into a handful of devastating scenes. This collection stands as a testament to her unparalleled ability to illuminate the private mythologies that govern human behaviour — and to leave the reader questioning the stories they tell about themselves.
Author: Doris Lessing
Format: Hardback
Published: 2003, Flamingo, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Genre: Modern fiction
Edition: 1st ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Signed with inscription
Four masterfully crafted novellas, bound together under the title The Grandmothers, present Doris Lessing at the height of her storytelling powers, dissecting the hidden currents of desire, family, and social expectation that run beneath the surface of ordinary lives. The title story chronicles an illicit and deeply unsettling relationship between two lifelong friends and the sons they have raised together, a transgression that forces a reckoning with the boundaries of love and loyalty, while Victoria and the Staveneys traces a young Black woman's entanglement with a well-meaning liberal family whose benevolence masks its own quiet cruelties. The Reason For It reaches back to a mythic, prehistoric community to illuminate how civilisations sow the seeds of their own destruction, and A Love Child resurrects the ghost of wartime passion through a soldier haunted by a woman and child he can never be certain existed. Lessing, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, brings her characteristic unsentimental precision to each of these tales, refusing easy resolutions and demanding that the reader sit with moral ambiguity. Her prose is spare yet charged, capable of compressing entire lifetimes and social histories into a handful of devastating scenes. This collection stands as a testament to her unparalleled ability to illuminate the private mythologies that govern human behaviour — and to leave the reader questioning the stories they tell about themselves.