London Observed - Softcover

Lessing, Doris May; Lessing, Doris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586092269 ISBN 13: 9780586092262

Publisher: Harpercollins Pub Ltd, 1993

Synopsis

'During that first year in England, I had a vision of London I cannot recall now...it was a nightmare city that I lived in for a year. Then, one evening, walking across the park, the light welded buildings, trees and scarlet buses into something familiar and beautiful, and I knew myself to be at home.'

Doris Lessing wrote those words in 1957, and since then she has continued to observe both London and its inhabitants with the shrewd, sensitive eye of an artist. Representing over three decades of fine writing, London Observed. Stories and Sketches contains eighteen perfect pen-portraits of Londoners and their city.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Explicit tenderness is a hallmark of many of these tales. Here's art holding up a mirror to life to London, and declaring a vision untarnished, clear and steady.' - New Statesman Society

'Lessing maintains the nice tension between compassion and rather brutal detachment that is characteristic of her best work.' - Independent on Sunday

'Lessing's vision of London is a brilliant diorama of comedy, tragedy and squalor, lifted by moments of true delight.' - Cosmopolitan

'This collection is full of fine things.' - The Times

'These are intriguing, potent, witty and sometimes macabre tales.' - Time Out

'She exercises the faculty of observation with an acuity and percipience shared by few other living writers.' - Harpers & Queen

About the Author:

Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 and was taken to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) when she was five. She spent her childhood on a large farm there and first came to England in 1949. She brought with her the manuscript of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which was published in 1950 with outstanding success in Britain, in America, and in ten European countries. Since then her international reputation not only as a novelist but as a non-fiction and short story writer has flourished. For her collection of short novels, Five, she was honoured with the 1954 Somerset Maugham Award. She was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1981, and the German Federal Republic Shakespeare Prize of 1982. Among her other celebrated novels are The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark and Memoirs of a Survivor. Her short stories have been collected in a number of volumes, including To Room Nineteen and The Temptation of Jack Orkney; while her African stories appear in This Was the Old Chief's Country and The Sun Between Their Feet. Shikasta, the first in a series of five novels with the overall title of Canopus in Argos: Archives, was published in 1979. Her novel The Good Terrorist won the W. H. Smith Literary Award for 1985, and the Mondello Prize in Italy that year. The Fifth Child won the Grinzane Cavour Prize in Italy, an award voted on by students in their final year at school. The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 was made into an opera with Philip Glass, libretto by the author, and premiered in Houston. London Observed, her latest collection of stories and sketches, was published to wide acclaim in 1992.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins Pub Ltd
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0586092269
• ISBN 13: 9780586092262
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224