Winner of James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Biography) 1994.

'Passionate and compelling, a book so packed with extraordinary images that it has obliterated almost everything else I read in 1994.' Rose Tremain 'In this immediate, vivid, beautifully paced memoir, Doris Lessing sets the individual against history, the personal against the general and shows, by the example of her life set down honestly, how biography and fiction mesh, how fiction transmutes the personal to the general, how the particular experience illuminates the universe. By putting her life on the page, she has created her greatest work of art.' Hilary Mantel, LRB 'The book pulsates with life. The intensity of the sensory world is brilliantly evoked ... Not just the story of the first thirty years of one life, this is the biography also of an age.' Jane Dunn, Observer

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'.