Grass is Singing

Lessing, Doris

ISBN 10: 0586089241 / ISBN 13: 9780586089248

Published by Harper Perennial classics, 1989

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 666F41FA2BA17AE

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Grass is Singing
• Publisher: Harper Perennial classics
• Publication Date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0586089241
• ISBN 13: 9780586089248
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

The classic first novel from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Doris Lessing brought the manuscript of 'The Grass is Singing' with her when she left Southern Rhodesia and came to England in 1950. When it was first published it created an impact whose reverberations we are still feeling, and immediately established itself as a landmark in twentieth-century literature. Set in Rhodesia, it tells the story of Dick Turner, a failed white farmer and his wife, Mary, a town girl who hates the bush. Trapped by poverty, sapped by the heat of their tiny brick and iron house, Mary, lonely and frightened, turns to Moses, the black cook, for kindness and understanding. A masterpiece of realism, 'The Grass is Singing' is a superb evocation of Africa's majestic beauty, an intense psychological portrait of lives in confusion and, most of all, a passionate exploration of the ideology of white supremacy.

From the Back Cover

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.