MARAANDDANN
Thousands of years in the future, all the northern hemisphere is buried under the ice and snow of a new Ice Age. At the southern end of a large landmass called Ifrik, two children of the Mahondi people, seven- year-old Mara and her younger brother, Dann, are abducted from their home in the middle of the night. Raised as outsiders in a poor rural village, Mara and Dann learn to survive the hardships and dangers of a life threatened as much by an unforgiving climate and menacing animals as by a hostile community of Rock People. Eventually they join the great human migration North, away from the drought that is turning the southern land to dust and in search of a place with enough water and food to support human life. Traveling across the continent, the siblings enter cities rife with crime, power struggles, and corruption, learning as much about human nature as about how societies function. With a clear- eyed vision of the human condition, Mara and Dann is imaginative fiction at its best.
THE STORY OF GENERAL DANN AND MARA’S DAUGHTER, GRIOT AND THE SNOW DOG
Dann is grown up now, hunting for knowledge and despondent over the inadequacies of his civilization. With his trusted companions—Mara’s daughter, his hope for the future; the abandoned child- soldier Griot, who discovers the meaning of love and the ability to sing stories; and the snow dog, a faithful friend who brings him back from the depths of despair— Dann embarks on a strange and captivating adventure in a suddenly colder, more watery climate in the north.
THE GRANDMOTHERS: FOUR SHORT NOVELS
In the title novel, two friends fall in love with each other’s teenage sons, and these passions last for years, until the women end them, vowing a respectable old age. In Victoria and the Staveneys, a young woman gives birth to a child of mixed race and struggles with feelings of estrangement as her daughter gets drawn into a world of white privilege. The Reason for It traces the birth, faltering, and decline of an ancient culture, with enlightening modern resonances. A Love Child features a World War II soldier who believes he has fathered a love child during a fleeting wartime romance and cannot be convinced otherwise.
THE SWEETEST DREAM
Frances Lennox ladles out dinner every night to the motley, exuberant, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table: her two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends, and fresh-off-the-street friends. It’s the early 1960s and certainly “everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Except financial circumstances demand that Frances and her sons live with her proper ex-mother-in-law. And her ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, has just dumped his second wife’s problem child at Frances’s feet. And the world’s political landscape has suddenly become surreal beyond imagination...
Set against the backdrop of the decade that changed the world forever, The Sweetest Dream is a riveting look at a group of people who dared to dream—and faced the inevitable cleanup afterward—from one of the greatest writers of our time.
BEN, IN THE WORLD
At eighteen, Ben is in the world, but not of it. He is too large, too awkward, too inhumanly made. Now estranged from his family, he must find his own path in life. From London and the south of France to Brazil and the mountains of the Andes, Ben is tossed about in a tumultuous search for his people, a reason for his being. How the world receives him, and how he fares in it, will horrify and captivate until the novel’s dramatic finale.
LOVE, AGAIN
Love, Again tells the story of a sixty- five-year-old woman who falls in love and struggles to maintain her sanity. Widowed for many years, with grown children, Sarah is a writer who works in the theater in London. During the production of a play, she falls in love with a seductive young actor, the beautiful and androgynous twenty- eight-year-old Bill, and then with the more mature thirty-five-year-old director Henry. Finding herself in a state of longing and desire that she had thought was the province of younger women, Sarah is compelled to explore and examine her own personal history of love, from her earliest childhood desires to her most recent obsessions. The result is a brilliant anatomy of love from a master of human psychology who remains one of the most daring writers of fiction at work today.
UNDER MY SKIN: VOLUME ONE OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TO 1949
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. Under My Skin, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, offers a rare opportunity to discover the forces that shaped one of the most distinguished writers of our time.
WALKING IN THE SHADE: VOLUME TWO OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY—1949-1962
The second volume of Doris Lessing’s extraordinary autobiography covers the years 1949-62, from her arrival in war- weary London with her son, Peter, and the manuscript for her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, under her arm, to the publication of her most famous work of fiction, The Golden Notebook. She describes how communism dominated the intellectual life of the 1950s and how she, like nearly all communists, became disillusioned with extreme and rhetorical politics and left communism behind. Evoking the bohemian days of a young writer and single mother, Lessing speaks openly about her writing process, her friends and lovers, her involvement in the theater, and her political activities.
THE REAL THING: STORIES AND SKETCHES
The stories and sketches in this collection penetrate to the heart of human experience with the passion and intelligence readers have come to expect of Doris Lessing. Most of the pieces are set in contemporary London, a city the author loves for its variety, its diversity, its transitoriness, the way it connects the life of animals and birds in the parks to the streets. Lessing’s fiction also explores the darker corners of relationships between women and men, as in the rich and emotionally complex title story, in which she uncovers a more parlous reality behind the facade of the most conventional relationship between the sexes.
AFRICAN LAUGHTER
Based on her memories of growing up in Southern Rhodesia and the experiences of four visits to Zimbabwe in the 1980s and 1990s, African Laughter is Lessing’s poignant study of the homeland from which she was exiled for twenty-five years. With rich detail and intimate understanding, she tackles the role that changing racial and social dynamics, the onslaught of AIDS, political corruption, and ecological factors have played in Zimbabwe’s evolution from colonial territory to modern nation.
PRISONS WE CHOOSE TO LIVE INSIDE: ESSAYS
With her signature candor and clarity, Lessing explores new ways to view ourselves and the society we live in, and gives us fresh answers to such enduring questions as how to think for ourselves and how to understand what we know.
IN PURSUIT OF THE ENGLISH: ADOCUMENTARY
In Pursuit of the English is a novelist’s account of a lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous, funny, pathetic, full- blooded life in a working-class rooming house. It is a shrewd and unsentimental picture of Londoners you’ve probably never met or even read about—though they are the real English.
The truth of her perception shines through the pages of a work that is a brilliant piece of cultural interpretation, an intriguing memoir and a thoroughly engaging read.
GOING HOME: A MEMOIR
Going Home is Doris Lessing’s account of her first journey back to Africa, the land in which she grew up and in which so much of her emotion and her concern are still invested. Returning to Southern Rhodesia in 1956, she found that her love of Africa had remained as strong as her hatred of the idea of “white supremacy” espoused by its ruling class. Going Home evokes brilliantly the experience of the people, black and white, who have shaped and will shape a beloved country.
MARTHA QUEST
Intelligent, sensitive, and fiercely passionate, Martha Quest is a young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood. She is a romantic idealistic in revolt
against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the fullest with every nerve, emotion, and instinct laid bare to experience. For her, this is a time of solitary reading, daydreams, dancing—and the first disturbing encounters with sex. Martha Quest is the first novel in Doris Lessing’s classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece in its own right and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.
A PROPER MARRIAGE
An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a failing marriage. Finally, she must make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security.
A Proper Marriage is the second novel in the Children of Violence series.
A RIPPLE FROM THE STORM
Martha Quest, the heroine of the Children of Violence series, has been acclaimed as one of the greatest fictional creations in the English language. In A Ripple from the Storm, Doris Lessing charts Martha Quest’s personal and political adventures in race-torn British Africa, following Martha through World War II, a grotesque second marriage, and an excursion into Communism. This wise and starling novel perceptively reveals the paradoxes, passions, and ironies rooted in the life of twentieth-century Anglo-Africa.
A Ripple from the Storm is the third novel in the Children of Violence series.
LANDLOCKED
In the aftermath of World War II, Martha Quest finds herself completely disillusioned. She is losing faith in the Communist movement in Africa, and her marriage to one of the movement’s leaders is disintegrating. Determined to resist the erosion of her personality, she engages in her first satisfactory love affair and breaks free, if only momentarily, from her suffocating unhappiness.
Landlocked is the fourth novel in the Children of Violence series.
THE FOUR-GATED CITY
Now middle-aged, Martha Quest moves to London, where she lives through many of the great social and political movements of the second half of the twentieth century. In Lessing’s chilling rendition, though, that century ends with the nuclear decimation of World War III.
The Four-Gated City is the fifth and final novel in the Children of Violence series.
ALSO BY DORIS LESSING
NOVELS
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
The Memoirs of a Survivor
The Diaries offane Somers:
The Diary of a Good Neighbor
If the Old Could ...
The Good Terrorist
The Fifth Child
Love, Again
Mara and Dann
Ben, in the World
The Sweetest Dream
The Story of General Dann and
Mara’s Daughter, Griot
and the Snow Dog
The Cleft
“CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES” SERIES
Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
“CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE” SERIES
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
SHORT STORIES
African Stories:
Volume I: This Was the Old Chiefs Country
Volume II: The Sun Between Their Feet
Stories:
Volume I: To Room Nineteen
Volume II: The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories
The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches (U.S.), London Observed (U.K.)
The Grandmothers
OPERA
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (music by Philip Glass)
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (music by Philip Glass)
POETRY
Fourteen Poems
NONFICTION
In Pursuit of the English
Particularly Cats
Going Home
A Small Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
Particularly Cats. . . and Rufus
African Laughter
Time Bites
Alfred and Emily
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Under My Skin
Walking in the Shade
The Doris Lessing Reader
Copyright
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1950 by Thomas Y. Crowell Company, Inc. A previous paperback edition was published in 1976 by Plume and reissued in 1991.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE GRASS IS SINGING. Copyright © 1950 by Doris Lessing. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
FIRST PERENNIAL CLASSICS EDITION PUBLISHED 2000.
FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL MODERN CLASSICS EDITION PUBLISHED 2008.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Perennial Classics edition as follows:
Lessing, Doris May, 1919-
The grass is singing / Doris Lessing.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-095346-2
I. Title
PR6023.E833G7 2000
823’.914-dc21 99-35316
ISBN 978-0-06-167374-0 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition)
EPub Edition © MAY 2013 ISBN: 9780062294999
08 09 10 11 12 ID/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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