Collected African Stories: Volume Two: The Sun Between Their Feet

The second volume of Doris Lessing's `Collected African Stories', and a classic work from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.`As for these stories - when I write one, it is as if I open a gate into a landscape which is always there. Time has nothing to do with it. A certain kind of pulse starts beating, and I recognise it: it is time I wrote another story from that landscape, external and internal at the same time, which was once the Old Chief's Country.' Doris Lessing, from the PrefaceThis much-acclaimed collection of stories vividly evokes both the grandeur of Africa and the glare of its sun and the wide open space, as well as the great, irresolvable tensions between whites and blacks. Tales of poor white farmers and their lonely wives, of storm air thick with locusts, of ants and pomegranate trees, black servants and the year of hunger in a native village - all combine to present a powerful image of a continent which seems incorruptible in spite of all the people who plough, mine and plunder it to make their living. In Doris Lessing's own words, `Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.'

'Some stories are set in the Twenties, others in the war, others thereafter, but all draw with unhampered directness upon childhood sensation undiminished by distance and memory. With a boundless fecundity and flow, these stories are timeless, as though heat and wilderness took the place of time. Unblinkingly aware of how tortuous and intricate the whole question or identity is in Southern Africa, Doris Lessing has an extraordinarily generous and uncontemptuous feeling for the values of settler life without ever condoning it, fundamental injustices.' - Gabriel Pearson, Daily Telegraph

'Doris Lessing can take what appears to be commonplace, mere passing anecdote and turn it deftly until its inner light is released: one feels that she has gazed upon the stories in her mind until that peculiar angle of vision, the angle that pierces obliquely but clean to the heart of a thing, has finally been found.' - Jacky Gillott, The Times