The Sun Between Their Feet

This much-acclaimed collection of stories vividly evokes both the grandeur of Africa, 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 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.'

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 1981, and the German Federal Republic Shakespeare Prize of 1982. Among her other celebrated novels are The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark and Memoirs of a Survivor. 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. London Observed, her latest collection of stories and sketches, was published to wide acclaim in 1992.