Doris Lessing Books in Order

An elderly woman living on the margins of a city takes in a fierce, half wild cat. Their wary companionship, played out against rubbish tips and derelict buildings, becomes a stark little study in loyalty, poverty, and the thin line between survival and collapse.

Half invented, half documentary, this book reimagines how Lessing's parents' lives might have unfolded without the First World War, then sets that against the harsher reality they actually lived in Persia and Rhodesia. It is both family portrait and reflection on how war distorts ordinary lives.

Narrated by a Roman senator, this speculative myth tells of an ancient coastal people made up only of women, the Clefts, who reproduce without men. When "monstrous" male infants begin to appear, fear, violence, and eventually uneasy cooperation reshape the origins of humanity.

In a colder, more flooded phase of the future, Dann is a reluctant general haunted by loss. With Mara's daughter, the loyal soldier Griot, and a white "snow dog" at his side, he struggles to lead refugees and salvage knowledge from a crumbling civilisation.

Subtitled Views and Reviews, this book gathers essays, book reviews, and occasional pieces written over three decades. Lessing ranges across literature, politics, history, and ageing, bringing a direct, conversational tone and a lifelong reader's curiosity to each subject.

Four novellas explore desire, power, and memory. The best known, "The Grandmothers," centres on two women who become lovers to each other's sons, while other pieces follow a mixed race girl visiting wealthy relatives, a young man haunted by childhood, and a writer confronting her past.

Originally published as part of The Grandmothers, this novella follows two lifelong friends in an Australian seaside town who each begin affairs with the other's teenage son. The tangled relationships test ideas of motherhood, desire, and the stories people tell to justify what they do.

Centred on Frances Lennox and her chaotic London household in the 1960s, this novel tracks idealistic students, ex husbands, and African revolutionaries over decades. It moves from a North London kitchen table to a struggling fictional African nation, testing the promises of liberation and the weight of compromise.

A companion piece to Particularly Cats, this novella follows El Magnifico, an imperious tomcat growing frail, and the woman who cares for him. Lessing uses his decline to meditate quietly on loyalty, responsibility, and what it means to watch a beloved creature age.

A compact reader about Doris Lessing's life and work, this volume surveys her major novels, recurring themes, and critical reception. It serves as an accessible introduction for students and general readers wanting a concise guide to her career.

Now a young man, Ben Lovatt drifts through boarding houses, criminal schemes, film projects, and scientific tests in a world that finds him both fascinating and repellent. This bleak, compulsive sequel follows his search for belonging and the repeated betrayals he endures.

Expanded from a talk for the Institute for Cultural Research, this small book muses on the deep history of storytelling. Lessing considers how myths travel between cultures, how tales once taught the young, and what we lose when stories are treated only as entertainment.

Thousands of years in the future, after ice and drought have reshaped Earth, orphaned siblings Mara and Dann trek north across the parched continent of Ifrik in search of water and safety. Their journey becomes a fierce adventure and a parable about survival and memory.

Volume two of Lessing's autobiography follows her from 1949 to 1962. It covers early London years, love affairs, party politics, psychotherapy, and the writing of key novels, offering a brisk, often caustic view of literary and political circles in postwar Britain.

This collection of interviews spans several decades of Lessing's career. In conversations with critics and journalists she discusses communism, feminism, Sufism, her major books, and the ways public labels have both helped and distorted readers' sense of her work.

Set in a London bedsit over the course of one night, this stage play follows Anna Freeman as she sparrs with past and present lovers, would be suitors, and friends. Their talk circles freedom, security, and the price women pay for refusing conventional roles.

A school edition built around the story "Spies I Have Known" and other pieces, this volume introduces younger readers to Lessing's African fiction. The title story quietly exposes the racism and paranoia of white settlers through the eyes of a child.

At sixty five, theatre administrator and sometime playwright Sarah Durham expects emotional calm. Working on a musical about a tragic Caribbean composer, she finds herself overwhelmed by renewed desire for a young actor and the production's married director, forcing her to rethink love and age.

The first volume of Lessing's autobiography covers her life from birth in 1919 to her departure for London in 1949. She writes with unsparing detail about her parents, childhood on a Rhodesian farm, early marriages, politics, and the decision to become a writer.

This speculative tale, told in graphic form in some editions, follows Joe, a young man from a grim estate, whose fierce belief in himself attracts the enigmatic Francesca Bird. Together they enter a mysterious "game" that promises escape from poverty but blurs ambition and illusion.

Subtitled Four Visits to Zimbabwe, this memoir records trips Lessing made to the country where she grew up after independence. Moving between city streets, rural villages, and old haunts, she charts hope, corruption, resilience, and her own complicated sense of homecoming.

Eighteen stories and sketches about London life, from hospital wards and taxi rides to shabby flats and country houses. Lessing captures small, telling moments in the city, revealing how ordinary encounters carry buried loneliness, desire, resentment, and occasional grace.

Chosen by Lessing herself, this reader brings together extracts from novels, complete stories, and nonfiction pieces. It is designed to showcase the range of her work, from African fiction and Martha Quest to later speculative writing and autobiographical essays.

In this classic coming of age story, a boy on holiday becomes obsessed with swimming through an underwater tunnel used by older local boys. His secret, dangerous training culminates in a solitary test of endurance that quietly alters his relationship with his mother.

The second volume of Collected African Stories gathers later tales of Rhodesian farms, towns, and villages. From locust swarms and drought to moments of stubborn tenderness, Lessing portrays people marked by the landscape and by the unresolved tensions of colonial rule.

Harriet and David Lovatt dream of a large, happy family in 1960s England, until the arrival of their fifth child, Ben, shatters the household. Part domestic novel and part modern horror tale, it probes fear, otherness, and the limits of parental love.

This short work of reportage grows out of Lessing's visit to Afghan fighters and refugees based in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation. She weaves interviews, observations, and commentary into a sharp reflection on war, propaganda, and the ease of international indifference.

Based on a series of talks, these brief essays explore how group thinking, nationalism, and propaganda shape behaviour. Lessing urges readers to notice the mental "prisons" they enter willingly and to cultivate scepticism about comforting collective myths.

Alice Mellings, an earnest drifter in 1980s London, mothers a shabby squat of would be revolutionaries, coaxing the council and neighbours while others plot. When the group decides to build a bomb, her talent for domestic order collides with the brutal logic of political violence.

In this companion to The Diary of a Good Neighbour, Jane Somers is drawn into the crisis of her troubled teenage niece Kate. Balancing work, grief, and caregiving, she confronts the gulf between generations and the limits of what one person can do for another.

Set on a minor, unstable empire at the edge of the galaxy, this satirical novel follows Canopean observers watching politics crumble under the sway of overheated rhetoric. Speeches themselves become a kind of disease, warping thought and turning revolution into empty performance.

Written under the name Jane Somers, this diary follows a fashionable magazine editor whose life shifts when she befriends Maudie, a fiercely independent, impoverished nonagenarian. Day by day, visits, errands, and hospital corridors reveal the cost of old age and social invisibility.

On Planet 8, a peaceful world guided by Canopus, people are ordered to build a vast wall against an oncoming ice age. As temperatures plunge and hope of rescue fades, their leaders struggle to hold the community together and to find meaning in collective extinction.

Told by Ambien II, a high ranking official from the Sirian Empire, this novel revisits Earth's history from a rival power's viewpoint. It examines colonial arrogance, bureaucratic blindness, and the uneasy awakening of conscience when entire worlds are treated as experiments.

In a symbolic landscape of "Zones" encircling Earth, a serene matriarchal realm is ordered to unite with a harsher, warlike neighbour. The enforced marriage between Al Ith and Ben Ata becomes a fable about gender, power, and the painful work of real understanding.

These stories, written in the late 1960s and early 70s, look at changing sexual mores, political activism, and the pull of solitude. The title piece follows a man determined to avoid marriage and the compromises it demands, with results that are at once comic and sad.

Presented as reports and documents from a galactic civil service, this novel recounts Earth's history as a failed Canopean colony called Shikasta. Through cosmic case files and one agent's fieldwork, Lessing reframes war, empire, and spiritual collapse on a planetary scale.

A substantial selection of Lessing's short fiction drawn from across her career. African tales, London sketches, and experimental pieces sit side by side, offering a broad survey of how her concerns and methods evolved over time.

In a near future city sliding into collapse, a middle aged woman unexpectedly becomes guardian to a teenage girl, Emily. As gangs roam outside, a mysterious wall in her flat opens onto another reality. The book blends dystopian realism with dreamlike voyages into memory and possibility.

A collection of essays, lectures, and interviews in which Lessing reflects on writing, politics, and responsibility. She talks about being a "humanist" writer, the pressures of ideology, and why stories still matter in a violent, rapidly changing world.

With her children grown and her husband travelling, forty five year old Kate Brown steps out of her carefully managed suburban life. A summer of interpreting work, affairs, and illness forces her to confront aging, desire, and the difference between the woman she is and the roles she performs.

This collection, subtitled and other stories, focuses largely on postwar London lives. The title story follows a long time socialist activist confronting age, disillusion, and a strange, almost mystical experience, while other pieces explore family rifts, illness, and late awakenings.

Found wandering London with no memory, classics professor Charles Watkins is confined to a psychiatric hospital. Inside his mind he undertakes vast sea voyages and cosmic journeys, while doctors debate drugs and diagnosis. The novel questions what counts as sanity and who gets to decide.

Martha Quest arrives in postwar London and becomes entangled with the Coldridge family, Cold War politics, and the early peace movement. The final Children of Violence volume slowly shifts into a speculative future, blending social history, psychological exploration, and apocalyptic vision.

Set in a landlocked Central African colony after the war, this fourth Children of Violence novel finds Martha suspended between political engagement and private disillusion. The changing country, stalled marriage, and uneasy white community mirror her own sense of being trapped.

Part memoir, part story collection, this small book chronicles the many cats in Lessing's life, from semi feral farm creatures in Africa to demanding London housemates. Her sharp, unsentimental observations capture feline personalities and the odd, deep bond between humans and cats.

Bringing together Particularly Cats, Rufus the Survivor, and The Old Age of El Magnifico, this volume traces a lifetime of living with cats. Lessing writes vividly about semi feral farm cats, London companions, and the strange, intimate communication that grows between species.

In these stories Lessing examines race, class, and belief in colonial and postwar settings. The title piece, about a controversial painting of a Black Madonna, typifies her interest in collisions between sentimental liberalism, entrenched prejudice, and the stubborn reality of other people's lives.

Selected from her larger African collections, these nine stories offer a concentrated introduction to Lessing's colonial settings. They show everyday racism, small acts of courage, and the uneasy fascination the land exerts on those who have tried to conquer it.

An earlier omnibus of Lessing's African fiction, this collection gathers many of her best known stories set in Southern Rhodesia. It includes tales of white farmers, Black workers, children growing into awareness, and the fierce, indifferent countryside that surrounds them.

A book of stories, many drawn from African settings, in which characters test the boundaries of conventional marriage, respectability, and belonging. Lessing juxtaposes stark landscapes with emotional restlessness, often tracing how brief encounters leave lasting marks.

This collection gathers stories set in both Africa and England, focusing on marriages, affairs, and uneasy friendships. Lessing writes with cool clarity about desire, resentment, and the small shifts of power that shape relationships between men and women.

Writer Anna Wulf keeps four coloured notebooks to separate her political work, personal life, memories of Africa, and a fictionalised self. As they fracture and then converge, the novel charts breakdown and reintegration, and questions how a woman can live honestly in a divided world.

Subtitled a documentary, this book draws on Lessing's early years in postwar London. Living in boarding houses and shared flats, she observes arguments, class anxieties, and fragile solidarities among people trying to build lives in a bombed, rationed city.

A slim volume of verse that offers another side of Lessing's voice. The poems touch on love, politics, memory, and the African landscapes of her youth, using plain, direct language rather than elaborate lyricism.

In this long story, Susan Rawlings seems to have everything a sensible middle class woman should want: husband, children, house. As a nameless unease deepens, she begins secretly renting a hotel room, Room Nineteen, seeking solitude that slowly edges toward self destruction.

Back in the Central African town of her youth, Martha joins a small communist group during the Second World War. Meetings, leaflets, and quarrels consume the members as Lessing dissects the hopes, self deceptions, and power struggles inside a tiny revolutionary cell.

Stories in this volume explore love in many guises: between parents and children, long term partners, casual lovers, and strangers thrown together. Set in both Africa and Europe, they trace the habits, compromises, and small rebellions that shape intimate lives.

In this candid memoir of a return visit to Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s, Lessing revisits the farm where she grew up and the segregated society she left. She records conversations, landscapes, and political currents with a cool eye and complicated affection.

A young Englishwoman, Julia, falls under the spell of Jan Brod, an older idealistic communist from Eastern Europe. Their affair becomes a clash between political fervour and comfortable apathy, exposing generational divides and the temptations of retreating from difficult truths.

This collection of five short novels ranges across African farms, European cities, and strained marriages. Each piece offers a concentrated portrait of people under pressure, from young idealists to disappointed adults, showing Lessing's early command of structure and moral nuance.

Martha Quest tumbles into marriage and motherhood just as war and politics are reshaping her world. This second Children of Violence novel charts her resentment at domestic confinement, her uneasy role as a "proper" wife, and the growing sense that her life is being lived for her.

Lessing's early African stories, collected here, depict white farmers, African chiefs, servants, and drifters in Southern Rhodesia. Through children, lonely wives, and stubborn old men she shows a land of fierce beauty and a society fraying under the pressures of race and power.

Fifteen year old Martha lives on a failing farm in colonial Southern Rhodesia, devouring books and despising the narrowness of white society. Her move to town, office work, dances, and first affairs mark the beginning of a long struggle to define freedom for herself.

Set in 1940s Southern Rhodesia, this first novel opens with the murder of a white farmer's wife by her Black houseboy. Lessing then unwinds the story of Mary and Dick Turner, their failing farm, and Mary's mental unravelling in a society built on racial violence.