The novel takes place in three of six metaphysical Zones that encircle the planet Shikasta (an allegorical Earth), and concerns two ordained marriages that link the patriarchal and militaristic Zone Four with the matriarchal and egalitarian Zone Three, and the tribal and barbaric Zone Five. The story is told from the point of view of the matriarchal utopian Zone Three, and is about gender conflict and the breaking down of barriers between the sexes....

The fifth volume of the author's "Canopus in Argos" series focuses on the madness and false promise of words, rhetoric-induced delusion, as suffered by a young Canopean official in the small Volyen Empire.

First pub. 1958. Story continues with the development of a young rebellious Rhodesian girl, Martha Quest, reacting against her white, colonial, middle class background in both its social and political aspects.

In this collection of stories, which spans four decades, Doris Lessing's unique gift for observation, her wit, her compassion and remarkable ability to illuminate the complexities of human life are all displayed.

In a personal meditation on family, war, and memory, the author re-imagines the lives of her parents if World War I had not happened, and also relates the facts of their lives in the wake of the war's devastation.

In the ruined, barbaric city of the near future, where rats and roving gangs terrorize the streets, where government has broken down and meaningless violence holds sway, a lone woman cares for a deserted child and surveys her city's disintegration, the hordes of safety-seeking people, and her own painful adolescence, childhood, and infancy. THis book, which the author has called "an attempt at autobiography," is that woman's journal -- a glimpse of...

This wide-ranging collection of stories by the renowned Nobel Laureate - spanning more than two decades of her career - highlights her singular gifts for portraying the complex lives of men and women in a modern, often alienating world. Included are seminal stories like "To Room Nineteen," in which a woman reacts against the oppression of her banal marriage with dreadful results, and "One off the Short List," which traces the surprising conclusion...