Martha Quest - Softcover

Lessing, Doris

3.79

2,498 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060976667 ISBN 13: 9780060976668

Publisher: HarpPeren, 1995

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Martha Quest is a passionate and intelligent young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood to marriage. She is a romantic idealist in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion, and instinct bared to experience. For her, this is a time of solidarity reading, daydreams, dancing--and the first disturbing encounters with sex.

Martha Quest is the first novel in Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence sequence of novels, each a masterpiece in its own right, and, taken together, an incisive, all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

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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, including the Somerset Maugham Award, the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, the James Tait Black Prize for best biography, Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize and Prix Catalunya, and the S. T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature.

Lessing was born of British parents in Persia on October 22, 1919, and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949, where she published her first book, The Grass Is Singing, and began her career as a professional writer. In 1962, she broke new ground with her novel The Golden Notebook. She wrote more than thirty books—among them the novels Martha Quest, The Fifth Child, and her last work Alfred and Emily; stories, reportage, poems, and plays; and several nonfiction works, including books about cats, and two volumes of autobiography, Walking in the Shade and Under My Skin. She died on November 17, 2013. Her portrait hangs in London's National Portrait Gallery.

Review:

"A formidable talent." -- -- C. P. Snow

"For sheer poise I don't think there has been a writer to touch her since Jane Austin." -- -- John Wain, Observer

"Stubborn, resilient, wry towards herself, Martha is Doris Lessing's most satisfying and complex characterization. She is a child of her times, of violence, who 'could no more dissociate herself from the violence done by her than a tadpole can live out of water." -- Times (London)

"There are many notable descriptions of adolescent boys and young men in our fiction. There are very few, in the same deep and radical sense, of young women. Mrs. Lessing's study of Martha Quest is one of them." -- New York Times Book Review

"A formidable talent." -- C. P. Snow

"For sheer poise I don't think there has been a writer to touch her since Jane Austin." -- John Wain, Observer

"I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do." -- Barbara Kingsolver

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