The Grass Is Singing : A Novel (Perennial Classics)

New Statesman
"An extremely mature psychological study. [The Grass Is Singing] is full of touches of truth seldom mentioned but instantly recognized. By any standards, this, book shows remarkable powers and imagination."



"Her impressive first novel is told with all the intensity and passion Miss Lessing compacts into all her work."



"There is passion here, a piercing accuracy a rare sensitivity and power. . . . One can only marvel."


New York Review of Books
"Emotional unity and force ... one of her best works."


Book Description
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, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of an enigmatic and virile black servant, Moses. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses--master and slave--are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion. Their psychic tension explodes in an electrifying scene that ends this disturbing tale of racial strife in colonial South Africa.The Grass Is Singing blends Lessing's imaginative vision with her own vividly remembered early childhood to recreate the quiet horror of a woman's struggle against a ruthless fate.


About the Author
Doris Lessing was born to British parents in Persia in 1919 and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books--novels, short stories, reportage, poems, and plays--and is considered among the most important writers of the postwar era. Her most recent works include two volumes of autobiography, Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade, and a novel, Mara and Dann.


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Doris Lessing was born to British parents in Persia in 1919 and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books—novels, short stories, reportage, poems, and plays—and is considered among the most important writers of the postwar era. Her most recent works include two volumes of autobiography, Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade, and a novel, Mara and Dann.


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