The Sun Between Their Feet (Volume 2)

All Doris Lessing's short novels and stories about Africa are now collected into two volumes, This Was The Old Chief's Country and The Sun Between Their Feet. This volume, contains four stories from the collection A Man And Two Women, eight stories from The Habit of Loving, five stories from African Stories ('Hunger' originally appeared in Five and two from the recent collection The Story of A Non-marrying Man And Other Stories.

'I believe', writes Doris Lessing, 'that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like an old fever, latent always in their blood; or like an old wound throbbing in the bones as the air changes. That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile eve afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of though. Africa give you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.'

In this Edition:
Spies I Have Known
The Story of a Non-Marrying Man
The Black Madonna
The Trinket Box
The Pig
Traitors
The Words He Said
Lucy Grange
A Mild Attack of Locusts
Flavours of Exile
Getting Off the Altitude
A Road to the Big City
Plants and Girls
Flight
The Sun Between Their Feet
The Story of Two Dogs
The New Man
A Letter from Home
Hunger

'Some stories are set in the Twenties, others in the war, others thereafter, but all draw with unhampered directness upon childhood sensation undiminished by distance and memory. With a boundless fecundity and flow, these stories are timeless, as though heat and wilderness took the place of time. Unblinkingly aware of how tortuous and intricate the whole question or identity is in Southern Africa, Doris Lessing has an extraordinarily generous and uncontemptuous feeling for the values of settler life without ever condoning it, fundamental injustices.' - Gabriel Pearson, Daily Telegraph

'Doris Lessing can take what appears to be commonplace, mere passing anecdote and turn it deftly until its inner light is released: one feels that she has gazed upon the stories in her mind until that peculiar angle of vision, the angle that pierces obliquely but clean to the heart of a thing, has finally been found.' - Jacky Gillott, The Times