Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2858

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2858

Seventeen novels and story collections from Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, spanning her African realist fiction, the Children of Violence sequence, the Canopus in Argos science fiction cycle, and her later work. A rare chance to build a comprehensive Lessing library in a single purchase.

1. A Man and Two Women — Doris Lessing (Panther) — Lessing's third short story collection, ranging across London and Africa with her characteristic unflinching intelligence about the relations between men and women.
2. The Habit of Loving — Doris Lessing (Penguin) — Short stories exploring attachment, loneliness, and the strange durability of human need — Lessing in her most psychologically precise mode.
3. Briefing for a Descent into Hell — Doris Lessing (Panther) — A professor found wandering in London with no memory of who he is — Lessing's most formally daring novel, and a profound exploration of consciousness.
4. The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five — Doris Lessing (Canopus in Argos: Archives) — The second Canopus novel: a fable of masculine and feminine principles told as myth — more lyrical than the rest of the sequence.
5. The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight — Doris Lessing (Canopus in Argos: Archives) — A planet faces extinction and its people must transform — Lessing's most direct engagement with collective suffering and spiritual evolution.
6. The Golden Notebook — Doris Lessing — The novel that secured Lessing's reputation as one of the great writers of the twentieth century — four notebooks, one woman, and a formal and political ambition that still feels radical.
7. The Four-Gated City — Doris Lessing (Panther) — The fifth and final Children of Violence novel, moving from Martha Quest's African origins to a visionary near-future London — vast, strange, and unforgettable.
8. Collected African Stories: Volume Two — The Sun Between Their Feet — Doris Lessing (Panther) — The second volume of her African stories, gathering tales of the Rhodesian veld, farm life, and the social structures of colonial society.
9. The Sirian Experiments — Doris Lessing (Canopus in Argos: Archives) — The third Canopus novel, narrated by a female Sirian administrator who gradually comes to question the empire she serves.
10. The Summer Before the Dark — Doris Lessing (Penguin) — Kate Brown, middle-aged and invisible, walks out of her life for a summer — one of Lessing's most accessible and emotionally direct novels.
11. A Proper Marriage — Doris Lessing (Panther) — The second Children of Violence novel, following Martha Quest into marriage, motherhood, and the political upheaval of wartime Rhodesia.
12. Landlocked — Doris Lessing (Panther) — The fourth Children of Violence novel, in which Martha Quest prepares to leave Africa — an elegiac novel of departure and unresolved longing.
13. The Diaries of Jane Somers — Doris Lessing — Originally published under a pseudonym to test whether her work would be rejected without her name — a novel about ageing, female friendship, and what we owe the old.
14. Martha Quest — Doris Lessing (Panther) — The first Children of Violence novel, introducing the restless, brilliant Martha Quest in colonial Rhodesia — the beginning of one of the great fictional bildungsromans.
15. A Ripple from the Storm — Doris Lessing (Panther) — The third Children of Violence novel, in which Martha Quest immerses herself in wartime Communist politics and finds idealism slowly curdling.
16. Going Home — Doris Lessing (Panther) — Lessing's account of returning to Southern Rhodesia in 1956 — part travel memoir, part political document, and essential context for the African fiction.
17. The Grandmothers — Doris Lessing — Four novellas from late in Lessing's career, each exploring a different facet of love and its complications — quiet, precise, and rich.