Grass Is Singing

Doris Lessing's powerful first novel, THE GRASS IS SINGING, was praised for its astonishiing maturity and sensitivity when it first appeared. In the arid farmlands of South Africa in the early 1950s, Mary Turner, a frustrated white woman, and Dick, her ineffectual farmer-husband, confront Moses, the virile and enigmatic black servant. When Dick took her to his farm in the veldt, Mary stepped into a life entirely different from anything she had ever imagined. Little by little the ennui of the years on the farm worked their slow poison, and Mary's despair progressed until the fateful day when Moses arrived to begin work in the house. Locked in anguish, Mary Turner and Moses—master and slave—embody the classic pattern of mounting attraction and repulsion. Their psychic tension explodes in an electrifying scene that culminates this disturbing tale of racial struggle in modern colonial South Africa.

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.