Collected African Stories: Vol.1: This Was the Old Chief's Country - Softcover

Lessing, Doris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 058604602X ISBN 13: 9780586046029

Publisher: Grafton, 1979

Synopsis

All Doris Lessing's short novels and stories are now collected into two volumes, This Was The Old Chef's Country and The Sun Between Their Feet. This volume contains all the stories from the original book entitled This Was The Old Chief's Country and three of the short novels from Five, the book which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1954.'I believe,' writes Doris Lessing, "that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like a old fever, latent always in their blood; or it like an old wounded throbbing in the bones as the air changes. That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of thought. Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.'In thisThe Old Chief MshlangaA Sunrise on the VeldNo Witchcraft for SaleThe Second HutThe NuisanceThe De Wets Come to Kloof GrangeLittle TembiOld John's Place'Leopard' GeorgeWinter in JulyA Home for the Highland CattleEldoradoThe AntheapIncludes the Preface for the 1964 Collection and a new Preface for the 1973 Collection. All of these stories appeared in African Stories, 1963.

About this title

From the Publisher

Includes a new, previously uncollected story.

'In story after story, Doris Lessing portrays the helpless collisions and alienations of the races. In "The Second Hut", a Rhodesian farmer is torn with anxiety and guilt about employing a poor Boer assistant with ni ' me children because of the hostility between Boer and native workers. One brings away a sense, of the sheer human impossibility of South Africa, as a place fit only for habitation by the imagination of exiles and of children. All else seems lost, betrayed and spoiled, except the glare of the sun, the dust, the boulders. An impressive collection.' - Gabriel Pearson, Daily Telegraph

'Doris Lessing's sense of setting is so immediate, the touch and taste of her continent is so strong, that Africa seems to become the universe.' - Newsweek

About the Author

Doris Lessing 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 'Love, Again' and two volumes of her autobiography, 'Under my Skin', and 'Walking in the Shade'.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grafton
• Publication date: 1979
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 058604602X
• ISBN 13: 9780586046029
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400