The Grass Is Singing: A Novel (Perennial Classics) - Softcover

Lessing, Doris

3.83

13,680 ratings by Goodreads

9780060953461: The Grass Is Singing: A Novel (Perennial Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060953462 ISBN 13: 9780060953461

Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999

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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.

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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.

Review:

"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." -- New Statesman

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

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

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

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