To Room Nineteen

For more than four decades, Doris Lessing's work has wittily and wryly observed the muddle and passion of human relations, unflinchingly dissected its truths and shown us the unique quality of her understanding.

From the magnificent 'To Room Nineteen', a study of a dry, controlled middle class marriage 'grounded in intelligence', to the shocking and sharp 'A Woman on a Roof, where a workman becomes obsessed with a pretty sunbather, this superb collection of stories from the 1950s through to the 1990s bears witness to Doris Lessing's extraordinary perspective on the human condition.

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 198 1, and the German Federal Republic Shakespeare Prize of 1982. Among her other celebrated novels are The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark, Memoirs of a Survivor and the five volume Children of Violence series. 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. Her most recent works include a novel, Mara and Dann and two volumes of her autobiography, Under My Skin, and Walking in the Shade.