Shortlisted for British Book Awards: Reader's Digest Author of the Year Award 2008.

Praise for Doris Lessing: 'She's up there in the pantheon with Balzac and George Eliot. We're lucky she's still writing.' Lisa Appignanesi, Independent 'She has an extraordinary feeling for the peculiar vulnerabilities of the young and the elderly. And her portraits of human relationships are of quite staggering beauty.' Ruth Scurr, The Times 'Doris Lessing has changed the way we think about the world.' Blake Morrison Praise for 'The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog': 'Lessing pierces the heart with the half quotations that Dann's scribes scribble down as the books fall to dust in their hands ! Lessing has much wisdom to impart although she is astute enough not to preach but to pose some unsettling questions.' Maggie Gee, Sunday Times 'This is an unsettling but compelling novel -- like a nihilistic version of "The Lord of the Rings" with a deeply flawed, Shakespearean tragic hero at its centre.' Financial Times

Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Her first novel, 'The Grass is Singing' was published in 1950, and since then her international reputation has flourished. Among her other celebrated novels are 'The Golden Notebook', 'The Summer Before the Dark', and 'Memoirs of a Survivor'. Her most recent works include 'Love, Again' and two volumes of her autobiography, 'Under my Skin', and 'Walking in the Shade'.