Alfred and Emily

Lessing, Doris

ISBN 10: 0007233450 / ISBN 13: 9780007233458

Editore: Fourth Estate, 2008

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Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. This book is in good condition but will show signs of previous ownership. Please expect some creasing to the spine and/or minor damage to the cover.

Codice articolo CHL1065904

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Alfred and Emily
• Editore: Fourth Estate
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0007233450
• ISBN 13: 9780007233458
• Rilegatura: Hardcover
• Condizione: Used; Good

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

The first book after Doris’ Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead.

'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.'

In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In the first half of this book, Doris Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war at all, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester as children but leading separate lives. This is followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came to be in the shadow of that war, their move to Rhodesia, a damaged couple squatting over Doris's childhood in a strange land.

'Here I still am,' says Doris Lessing, 'trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.' With the publication of Alfred and Emily she has done just that.

Informazioni sull'autore

Doris Lessing was the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature and is one of the most important writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Her first novel, ‘The Grass is Singing’ was published in 1950, and since then her international reputation has flourished. Among her other celebrated novels are ‘The Golden Notebook’, ‘The Summer Before the Dark’, and ‘Memoirs of a Survivor’. Her most recent works include two volumes of autobiography, ‘Under my Skin’ and ‘Walking in the Shade’, her most recent novel is ‘The Cleft’.