In Pursuit of the English

In Pursuit of the English is a first-class novelist's account of the lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous, funny, pathetic, full-blooded life in a working-class rooming house. It is a shrewd and unsentimental picture of Londoners you've probably never met or even read about - though they are the real English.

In swift, barbed style, in high, hard, farcical writing that is eruptively funny, Doris Lessing records the joys and terrors of everyday life. The truth of her perception shines through the pages of a work that makes a permanent addition to writing about the English.

Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include "The Grass is Singing", "The Golden Notebook" and "The Good Terrorist". In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, "The Times" ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She died in 2013.