BRIEFING FOR DESCENT INTO HELL(ISBN=9781400077267)

　　“A brilliant and untamed image of the possibilities that may still constitute man’s destiny.”
　　　　　　——Time
　　“Touching and beautiful.”
　　　　　　——The New York Review of Books
　　“An excursion into private consciousness…beginning with everyday mentality and ending up in the darkest reaches of the unconscious at its most primitive.”
　　　　　　——The Washington Post Book World

　　A fascinating look inside the mind of a man who is supposedly “mad.” Professor Charles Watkins of Cambridge University is a patient at a mental hospital where the doctors try with increasing drugs to bring his mind under control. But Watkins has embarked on a tremendous psychological adventure where, after spinning endlessly on a raft in the Atlantic, he lands on a tropical island inhabited by strange creatures with strange customs. Later, he is carried off on a cosmic journey into space…

　　Doris Lessing was born of British parents in Persia, in 1919, and moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia when she was five years old. She went to England in 1949 and has lived there ever since. She is the author of more than thirty books—novels, stories, reportage, poems, and plays. In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

　　'A brilliant, disturbing book!her most adventurous, imaginative experiment. She allows her didactic, satirical ideas about our civilization memorable expression.' TLS 'Doris Lessing breaks through the semantic barrier into speculative areas of psychic geography like some returned traveller, drawing new, real maps. She is alert to more of the crucial questions than most of us and, by describing their contours so exactly, comes nearer to the slow progress towards solution.' Observer