SUMMER BEFORE THE DARK, THE(ISBN=9780307390622)

　　'This is probably the best book Doris Lessing has ever written. It would be a deprivation not to read it at once.' Economist 'An honest, perceptive, serious book.' Irish Times 'Painfully, poignantly authentic.' David Lodge, New Statesman 'A summer journey of self-discovery which ends amazingly, in an act of self-definition so searching, so acute and total, one puts down the book shaken, enlarged, in awe. It is an ostensibly simple story, simply told, developing all the way and deepening: the particular universalised in a narrative of compelling power. No wonder Mrs Lessing has been spoken of in the same breath as Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn.' Sunday Times

　　Nobel laureate Doris Lessing's classic novel of the pivotal summer in one woman's life is a brilliant excursion into the terrifying gulf between youth and old age. As the summer begins, Kate Brown--attractive, intelligent, forty-five, happily married, with a house in the London suburbs and three grown children--has no reason to expect that anything will change. But by summer's end the woman she was--living behind a protective camouflage of feminine charm and caring--no longer exists. The Summer Before the Dark" "takes us along on Kate's journey: from London to Turkey to Spain, from husband to lover to madness, on the road to a frightening new independence and a confrontation with herself that lets her finally and truly come of age.

　　Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her first novel, 'The Grass is Singing', was published in 1950. Among her other celebrated novels are 'The Golden Notebook', 'The Fifth Child' and 'Memoirs of a Survivor'. She has also published two volumes of her autobiography, 'Under my Skin' and 'Walking in the Shade'. Her most recent novel is 'The Cleft'.