Under My Skin : Volume One of My Autobiography, To 1949

The first volume of the autobiography of Doris Lessing, author of 'The Grass is Singing' and 'The Golden Notebook', and Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.

Winner of the James Tait Black Prize 1994.

Doris Lessing's autobiography begins with her childhood in Africa and ends on her arrival in London in 1949 with the typescript of her first novel in her suitcase.

It charts the evolution first of her consciousness, then of her sexuality and finally of her political awareness with an almost overwhelming immediacy, and is as distinctive and challenging as anything she has ever written.

It is already recognised as one of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century.

"I was born with skins too few. Or they were scrubbed off me by. . . robust and efficient hands."

The experiences absorbed through these "skins too few" are evoked in this memoir of Doris Lessing's childhood and youth as the daughter of a British colonial family in Persia and Southern Rhodesia Honestly and with overwhelming immediacy, Lessing maps the growth of her consciousness, her sexuality, and her politics, offering a rare opportunity to get under her skin and discover the forces that made her one of the most distinguished writers of our time.