The Sweetest Dream: A Novel - Softcover

Lessing, Doris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060937556 ISBN 13: 9780060937553

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2002

Synopsis

Frances Lennox ladles out dinner every night to the motley, exuberant, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable tableher two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends, and ftesh-off-the-street friends. It's the early 1960s and certainly "everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." Except financial circumstances demand that Frances and her sons Eve with her proper ex-mother-in-law. And her ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, has just dumped his second wife's problem child at Frances's feet. And the world's political landscape has suddenly become surreal beyond imagination....

Set against the backdrop of the decade that changed the world forever, The Sweetest Dream is a riveting look at a group of people who dared to dream-and faced the inevitable cleanup afterward -- from one of the greatest writers of our time.

About this title

Review:

The motivating power of dream and the political price of illusions are the subject of Doris Lessing's extended family saga, The Sweetest Dream. While Frances Lennox, uncomplaining and unsentimental about her roles as a 1960s earth mother for a string of "screwed up" post-war children, serves up endless nurturing at the crowded kitchen table of a large North London house, her ex- husband pursues revolution on all-expenses-paid trips and conferences. Occasionally he drops by for free meals or to dump one of the children, or wives, of another failed marriage on Frances's doorstep. Lessing is able to turn a dispassionate eye on the economics of free love, in which women usually pay.

From swinging-'60s London to liberated sub-Saharan Africa, the author depicts the human faces of a broad canvas of issues in this polemical piece. The novel ranges from anorexia to AIDS to casting a questioning eye at the morality of the travelers on the World Bank gravy train. Moving from London to the tragic landscape of post-independence "Zimlia" (a thinly veiled Zimbabwe), Lessing documents the social movement and lost dreams of a post-war generation, for whom "it is always The Dream that counts." --Rachel Holmes, Amazon.co.uk

About the Author:

Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing was one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of our time, the recipient of a host of international awards. She wrote more than thirty books—among them the novels Martha Quest, The Golden Notebook, and The Fifth Child. She died in 2013.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0060937556
• ISBN 13: 9780060937553
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496