Name: the cleft
Price: 17.11 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Lessing, Doris
ISBN: 9780060834876

Type

Physical Book

Author

Doris Lessing

Publisher

Harper Perennial

Language

English

Pages

260

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

20.1 x 13.5 x 1.8 cm

Weight

0.23 kg.

ISBN

0060834870

ISBN13

9780060834876

Synopsis "the cleft"

From Doris Lessing, "one of the most important writers of the past hundred years" (Times of London), comes a brilliant, darkly provocative alternative history of humankind's beginnings. In the last years of his life, a Roman senator retells the history of human creation and reveals the little-known story of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic coastal wilderness. The Clefts have neither need nor knowledge of men; childbirth is controlled through the cycles of the moon, and they bear only female children. But with the unheralded birth of a strange new child--a boy--the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy. In this fascinating and beguiling novel, Lessing confronts the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women manage to live side by side in the world and how the troublesome particulars of gender affect every aspect of our existence.

Doris Lessing

(Author)

View Author's Page

Doris Lessing (Iran, 1919 - London, 2013), was an English writer born in Persia, spent her childhood on a farm in Zimbabwe after her family moved there in 1924. She left school at 14 and was self-educated while working as a clinic assistant, marked by a contentious relationship with her mother that led her to become independent at 17. After two marriages and three children, she settled in England in 1949, where she began her literary career with The Grass is Singing (1950), a novel that denounced racism in Africa

Her work, influenced by her life in Africa and her communist activism, merges social criticism -colonialism, racial inequality- with autobiographical explorations, as in the series Children of Violence (1952-1969). She ventured into science fiction with Canopus in Argos and addressed women's emancipation in The Golden Notebook (1962), an iconic work that made her a feminist symbol despite her rejection of the label. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (2007) and the Prince of Asturias Award (2001), her legacy endures as one of the most critical and visionary voices of the 20th century.

See less