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, he fares in it will horrify and captivate until the novel's dramatic finale.

Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Abraham Lincoln's political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president. On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry. Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war. That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was the result of a character that had been forged by experiences that raised him above his more privileged and accomplished rivals. He won because he possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires. It was this capacity that enabled Lincoln as president to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war. We view the long, horrifying struggle from the vantage of the White House as Lincoln copes with incompetent generals, hostile congressmen, and his raucous cabinet. He overcomes these obstacles by winning the respect of his former competitors, and in the case of Seward, finds a loyal and crucial friend to see him through. This brilliant multiple biography is centered on Lincoln's mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in the nation's history.

The Good Terrorist follows Alice Mellings, a woman who transforms her home into a headquarters for a group of radicals who plan to join the IRA. As Alice struggles to bridge her ideology and her bourgeois upbringing, her companions encounter unexpected challenges in their quest to incite social change against complacency and capitalism. With a nuanced sense of the intersections between the personal and the political, Nobel laureate Doris Lessing creates in The Good Terrorist a compelling portrait of domesticity and rebellion. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Dorris Lessing's classic series of autobiographical novels is the fictional counterpart to Under My Skin. In these five novels, first published in the 1950's and 60s, Doris Lessing transformed her fascinating life into fiction, creating her most complex and compelling character, Martha Quest.

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 piece 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.

All Doris Lessing's short novels and stories are now collected into two volumes, This Was The Old Chef's Country and The Sun Between Their Feet. This volume contains all the stories from the original book entitled This Was The Old Chief's Country and three of the short novels from Five, the book which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1954. 'I believe,' writes Doris Lessing, "that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like a old fever, latent always in their blood; or it like an old wounded throbbing in the bones as the air changes. That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of thought. Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.' In this Edition: The Old Chief Mshlanga A Sunrise on the Veld No Witchcraft for Sale The Second Hut The Nuisance The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange Little Tembi Old John's Place 'Leopard' George Winter in July A Home for the Highland Cattle Eldorado The Antheap Includes the Preface for the 1964 Collection and a new Preface for the 1973 Collection. All of these stories appeared in African Stories, 1963.

Winner of the Pulitzer for History, No Ordinary Time is a chronicle of one of the most vibrant & revolutionary periods in US history. With an extraordinary collection of details, Goodwin weaves together a number of story lines—the Roosevelt’s marriage & partnership, Eleanor’s life as First Lady, & FDR’s White House & its impact on America as well as on a world at war. Goodwin melds these into an intimate portrait of Eleanor & Franklin Roosevelt & of the time during which a new, modern America was born. Preface "The decisive hour has come" "A few nice boys with BB guns" "Back to the Hudson" "Living here is very oppressive" "No ordinary time" "I am a juggler" "I can't do anything about her" "Arsenal of democracy" "Business as usual" "A great hour to live" "A completely changed world" "Two little boys playing soldier" "What can we do to help?" "By god, if it ain't Old Frank!" "We are striking back" "The greatest man I have ever known" "It is blood on your hands" "It was a sight I will never forget" "I want to sleep and sleep" "Suspended in space" "The old master still had it" "So darned busy" "It is good to be home" "Everybody is crying" "A new country is being born" Afterword Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Index Afterword

In the aftermath of World War II, Martha Quest finds herself completely disillusioned. She is losing faith with 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 the first satisfactory love affair and breaks free, if only momentarily, from her suffocating unhappiness. Landlocked is the fourth novel of Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence sequence of novels, each a masterpiece in its own right, and collectively an incisive, all encompassing vision of our world in the twentiethcentury. Author Biography: Doris Lessing was born Doris May Taylor in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Both of her parents were British: Her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming, the family moved to the British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Her mother installed Doris in a covenant school, and then later in an all-girls high school in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. She was 13, and it was the end of her formal education. Lessing's life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the cultural and biological imperatives that fated her to sink without a murmur into marriage and motherhood. Lessing believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. For her, writing is a process of "setting a distance," taking the "raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into therealm of the general." Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individual's own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Over the years, Lessing has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the 19th century — their "climate of ethical judgment" — to the demands of 20th-century ideas about consciousness and time. After writing the Children of Violence series (1952-1959), a formally conventional bildungsroman (novel of education) about the growth in consciousness of her heroine, Martha Quest, Lessing broke new ground with The Golden Notebook (1962), a daring narrative experiment in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing depth and detail. Anna Wolf, like Lessing herself, strives for ruthless honesty as she aims to free herself from the chaos, emotional numbness and hypocrisy afflicting her generation. In the 1970s and 1980s, Lessing began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wolf seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her "inner-space fiction" deals with cosmic fantasies Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 1971), dreamscapes and other dimensions (Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974), and science-fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos: Archives, 1979-1983). These reflect Lessing's interest, since the 1960s, in Idries Shah, whose writings on Sufi mysticism stress the evolution of consciousness and the belief that individual liberation can come about only if people understand the link between their own fates and the fate of society. Lessing's other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (The Diary of a Good Neighbor, 1983, and If the Old Could., 1984). In addition, she has written several nonfiction works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 was recently joined by Walking in the Shade: 1949 to 1962, both published by HarperCollins.

Published in America as The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches. Across eighteen short stories, Lessing dissects London and its inhabitants with the power for truth and compassion to be expected of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. 'During that first year in England, I had a vision of London I cannot recall now … it was a nightmare city that I lived in for a year. Then, one evening, walking across the park, the light welded buildings, trees and scarlet buses into something familiar and beautiful, and I knew myself to be at home.' Lessing’s vision of London – a place of nightmares and wonder – underpins this brilliantly multifaceted collection of stories about the city, seen from a cafe table, a hospital bed, the back seat of a taxi, a hospital casualty department; seen, as always, unflinchingly, and compellingly depicted.

Doris Lessing, one of England's finest living novelists, invites us to imagine a mythical society free from sexual intrigue, free from jealousy, free from petty rivalries: a society free from men. An old Roman senator, contemplative at his late stage of life, embarks on what will likely be his last endeavour: the retelling of the story of human creation. He recounts the history of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic, coastal wilderness, confined within the valley of an overshadowing mountain. The Clefts have no need nor knowledge of men -- childbirth is controlled, like the tides that lap around their feet, through the cycles of the moon, and their children are always female. But with the unheralded birth of a strange, new child -- a boy -- the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy. At first, in their ignorance, the Clefts are awestruck by this seemingly malformed child, but as more and more of these threateningly unfamiliar males appear, now unfavourably nicknamed Squirts, they are rejected, and are exposed on the nearby mountainside; sacrificed to the patrolling eagles overhead, the sentinels of their female haven. Unbeknownst to the Clefts, however, these baby males survive, aided by the very eagles sent to kill them, and thrive on their own on the other side of the mountain. It is not until an unusually curious young Cleft named Maire goes beyond the geographical, and emotional, divide of the mountain that this disquieting fact is uncovered -- a discovery that forces the Clefts to accept and realign themselves to the prospect of a now shared world, and the possible vengeance of the wronged males. In this fascinating and beguiling novel, Lessing confronts head-on the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women, two similar and yet thoroughly distinct creatures, manage to live side by side in the world, and how the specifics of gender affect every aspect of our existence.

Doris Lessing's love affair with cats began at a young age, when she became intrigued with the semiferal creatures on the African farm where she grew up. Her fascination with the handsome, domesticated creatures that have shared her flats and her life in London remained undiminished, and grew into real love with the awkwardly lovable El Magnifico, the last cat to share her home. On Cats is a celebrated classic, a memoir in which we meet the cats that have slunk and bullied and charmed their way into Doris Lessing's life. She tells their stories—their exploits, rivalries, terrors, affections, ancient gestures, and learned behaviors—with vivid simplicity. And she tells the story of herself in relation to cats: the way animals affect her and she them, and the communication that grows possible between them—a language of gesture and mood and desire as eloquent as the spoken word. No other writer conveys so truthfully the real interdependence of humans and cats or convinces us with such stunning recognition of the reasons why cats really matter.

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. Walking in the Shade is an invaluable social history as well as Doris Lessing's Sentimental Education.

Four novellas by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, that once again show her to be unequalled in her ability to capture the truth of the human condition. The title story, ‘The Grandmothers’, is an astonishing tour de force, a shockingly intimate portrait of an unconventional extended family and the lengths to which they will go to find happiness and love. Written with a keen cinematic eye, the story is a ruthless dissection of the veneer of middle-class morality and convention. ‘Victoria and the Staveneys’, takes us through 20 years of the life of a young underprivileged black girl in London. A chance meeting introduces her to the Staveneys – a liberal white middle-class family – and, seduced, she falls pregnant by one of the sons. As her daughter grows up, Victoria feels her parental control diminishing as the attractions of the Staveneys’ world exert themselves. An honest and often uncomfortable look at race relations in London over the past few decades, Lessing reaffirms her brilliance at demonstrating the effect of society on the individual. With these novellas, and ‘The Reason for It’ and ‘A Love Child’, Lessing proves once again that she is one of our most valuable and insightful living authors.

The first book after Doris' Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead. 'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.' In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In the first half of this book, Doris Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war at all, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester as children but leading separate lives. This is followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came to be in the shadow of that war, their move to Rhodesia, a damaged couple squatting over Doris's childhood in a strange land. 'Here I still am,' says Doris Lessing, 'trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.' With the publication of Alfred and Emily she has done just that.

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 Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece on its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

The third in Doris Lessing's visionary novel cycle "Canopus in Argos: Archives". It is a mix of fable, futuristic fantasy and pseudo-documentary accounts of 20th-century history.

Diane D In The Headlines is a sequel to DIANE D The Musical Drama and DANGEROUS DANA A Suspense Thriller. It is a suspense, drama, psychological, thriller about a family owned Charity and Entertainment Organization. This story involves 3 generations of the Diaz-Davidson family. The family's Charity and Entertainment Organization performs shows around the country and the world to raise money.This story involves two male hospital employees, one white and one black, who work the night shift. One night during the night shift, the two male hospital employees are working inside a dimly lit isolated clinic hallway as they eavesdrop outside one of the closed clinic room doors secretly listening on Diane D’s private conversation while Diane D is alone inside the clinic room talking on the telephone. The two male hospital employees hear Diane D about to leave the room. They quickly back up away from the door and quietly race back down the other end of the hallway going around the corner. As the two male hospital employees hide around the corner, they hear Diane D leaving the room shutting the door behind herself. They go to take a peak around the corner and accidentally make a loud noise! They fear that the loud noise has attracted Diane D’s attention, blowing their cover! They then hear slow footsteps coming so they quickly turn and sneak down the stairwell into the lower level of the clinic area. They then hide and bend behind some boxes in the dimly lit hallway on the lower level. They then see Diane D in the distance coming from around the dark corner. They secretly watch Diane D from the distance and see her strange eerie behavior as she looks around the dimly lit hallway as if looking for someone. They then see her go from locked clinic room door to locked clinic room door trying to open each door. They then witness Diane D do something so strange and so frightening that they become shocked and frozen in fear! They can't believe what they just witnessed her do! They frighteningly have their backs leaned against the wall with their mouths and eyes wide open not able to move! Diane D then angrily goes into a storage room. While she is inside the storage room, the two male hospital employees manage to break loose from their fear! They quickly sneak away and frighteningly run back down the hallway out of the area! They then turn around the corner and race towards the stairwell! They reach the stairwell door and run back into the stairwell! Once inside the stairwell, they run right back up the stairs, not looking back!This story also involves Diane D’s eerie and frightening performance in Germany which causes several thousand spectators in a German park to scream and run in fear!This story also involves, the Dianettes’ back stage attack on another well-known female singer who wanted to perform and collaborate on stage with them and Diane D at a shopping mall. Again, the Dianettes will not hear of it! They later chase down the well-known female singer and her husband behind the shopping mall inside the parking lot. They catch up to the well known female singer and her husband and knock them down to the ground! They then attack the well known female singer and her husband! All six of the Dianettes are then arrested over the beat down! The well-known female singer and her husband both had to be hospitalized which causes the well-known female singer’s upcoming concert in New York to be canceled! While the Dianettes’ are in police custody, they overhear that the two well-known Latin female duo who tried to perform and collaborate with them and Diane D before are outside the police station secretly talking to Diane D. The Dianettes then bust out the back door of the police station! They charge after the two well-known Latin female duo! The two well-known Latin female duo turn and have to run for their lives!

In an attempt to find a cure for the aids virus, scientists painstakingly create a new and deadly virus that turns humans into deadly, zombie like creatures. 25 year old college student Breanne Jacobs and her cousin Zoe do their best to prevent becoming victims of bloodshed. Love erupts during a dangerous time but can it last? Who will survive in these dangerous times?In an attempt to find a cure for the aids virus, scientists painstakingly create a new and deadly virus that turns humans into deadly, zombie like creatures. 25 year old college student Breanne Jacobs and her cousin Zoe do their best to prevent becoming victims of bloodshed. Once the virus is unleashed in the world, Zoe will do whatever it takes to protect those she loves.Love erupts in a dangerous time but can it last? In control of their own destiny, Breanne and Zoe try to make decisions that will keep not only themselves alive, but can they also protect the ones they love?This is the box set of the Infected series. It includes all 3 books.

Lost in the rain and out of gas on a back road in Kentucky, the Wroe Family takes refuge in a house where no one is home...but the ghosts. Slamming doors, strange crying and objects appearing and disappearing lead to the discovery of secret passages and a budding romance. But can they thwart the intentions of an ex-friend bent on arson and murder?Carpenter Ed Wroe, betrayed and wrongly accused by an ex-friend, Norman Jones, decides to move his family from North Carolina to Kentucky. Lost in the rain, they run out of gas on a backroad and take refuge in a haunted house. Slamming doors, strange crying, and objects that appear and disappear lead to the discovery of secret passages and the surprising identity of the home's former owners. Twin four-year-old Andy and Candy make some discoveries of their own. A romance blooms between neighbor, Johnny O'Reilly and Ed & Penny's seventeen-year-old daughter, Chrissy. But when ex-friend Norman Jones shows up again, will Johnny be able to thwart his intentions of arson and murder?

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.

This book includes every story written by Doris Lessing about Africa: all of her first collection, This Was the Old Chief's Country (unavailable in America); the four tales about Africa from Five (also unavailable); the African stories from The Habit of Loving and A Man and Two Women and four stories never before collected. This, then, is Doris Lessing's Africa - where she lived for twenty-five years and where so much of her interest and concern still resides. Here, as she sees them, are the complexities, the agonies and joys, the textures of African life and society. The collection, bridging as it does Mrs. Lessing's entire writing career, contains much of her most extraordinary work. Beyond that, it is a brilliant portrait of a world that is vital to all of us, shadowy to most of us - perceived by an artist of the first rank writing with passion and honesty about her native land. It is a central book in the work of one of the most important of today's writers.

The second novel in the Classic series "Canopus in Argos: Archives". A tale of love and the anicent battle between men and woman.

DIANE D In The Headlines is a sequel to DIANE D The Musical Drama and DANGEROUS DANA A Suspense Thriller. It is a suspense, drama, psychological, thriller about a family owned Charity and Entertainment Organization. This story involves 3 generations of the Diaz-Davidson family. The family's Charity and Entertainment Organization performs shows around the country and the world to raise money.DIANE D In The Headlines involves headline and article scandals, sniper shootings, highway shootings, road rage, drunk driving arrests, weapons possession charges, fist fights, attacks, highway car chasings, motorcycle chasings, paralyzations, miscarriages, abortions, suicide, mental illness, split personalities, eerie spirit possessions, superhuman strength and the supernatural. It also involves Diane D and her deranged and dangerous cousin Dana, of DANGEROUS DANA A Suspense Thriller, being tossed and thrown behind bars together! While Diane D and her cousin Dana are in jail, their lawyer is on the phone talking to Diane D. While he is talking to Diane D, he overhears Dana in the background hollering, cursing and swearing about him calling him every name in the book after he fails to get them bail! After the lawyer overhears Dana belittling him, he turns to Diane D and Dana’s family and threatens to quit and walk out on their case telling Diane D‘s family that he will represent Diane D, but not Dana! Diane D and Dana’s Grandfather Mike will not hear of it! He has a fit and tells the lawyer to either represent both Diane D and Dana or represent none of them!This story also involves a newspaper reporter and Dana getting into a heated argument and physical altercation outside a Banquet Hall over what the newspaper reporter threatens to write about Diane D! This story also involves three female police officers being beat up, attacked and injured on two separate occasions by Dana. Dana is soon tossed and thrown behind bars again for assaulting the female police officers. All three female officers are forced to quit and resign from the police force because of the injuries they suffered. This story also involves the Dianettes rivalry against another well known female pop group who wanted to perform and collaborate on stage with them and Diane D. Diane D says ‘yes’ to the collaboration but the Dianettes will not hear of it! The Dianettes and the other well known female pop group fuss and go at it with each other! The Dianettes later speed in their van and chase the other well known female singing group’s limousine down the highway all the way to the airport! When the Dianettes’ van and well-known female group’s limousine stop at the airport terminal, the Dianettes come out their van, run to the limousine and start to pull the other well known female pop group right out of the limousine! They then attack the other well known female pop group right at the airport! All six of the Dianettes are then tossed and thrown behind bars over the beat down! The other female pop group had to be hospitalized which causes them to miss their flight and upcoming concert in Paris!

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier year. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine reviles part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

In a beleaguered city where rats and roving gangs terrorize the streets, where government has broken down and meaningless violence holds sway, a woman -- middle-aged and middle-class -- is brought a twelve-year-old girl and told that it is her responsibility to raise the child. This book, which the author has called "an attempt at autobiography," is that woman's journal -- a glimpse of a future only slightly more horrendous than our present, and of the forces that alone can save us from total destruction

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 full 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. The first of Doris Lessing's timeless Children of Violence novels, Martha Quest is an endearing masterpiece.

This is Part 2 of DIANE D The Musical Drama, a sequel to DIANE D In The Headlines and DANGEROUS DANA A Suspense Thriller. It is a suspense, drama, psychological, thriller about a family owned Charity and Entertainment Organization. This story involves 3 generations of the Diaz-Davidson family. The family's Charity and Entertainment Organization performs shows around the country and the world.In Part 2, Diane D gets in trouble by her family. The following day, she goes inside her family's office, goes to the telephone and secretly threatens her lover's girlfriend right over the telephone, blaming her lover's girlfriend for calling her family up causing all that trouble for her. Diane D also goes man-hunting for a date for a High School Dance she is suppose to appear at and perform. When one of the men finally agrees to be Diane D’s date, his wife finds out about it. The man's wife goes and looks for Diane D. When she finds Diane D inside a church, she angrily confronts Diane D! She then pays a price for it. Diane D and her family appear at an elementary school one night so that Diane D can perform for a charity case there. After Diane D’s singing performance inside a crowded auditorium is over, a chubby little 9-year old black boy named Marcus approaches her. He brings Diane D to a private area in the school and tells Diane D that there is no charity case in the school. He confesses to Diane D that there was never a charity case at the school that the entire charity case was all a hoax planned by him and his older brother. He tells Diane D that he and his brother tricked her and her family into thinking that there was a charity case at the school just so that she can appear there and perform. Diane D becomes shocked when she realize that there was never a charity case at the school. She is shocked when she realize that she and her family had been tricked into coming to the school. She starts to become sad. She then becomes angry. She then goes CRAZY and terrorizes and harms the little boy right inside the school! The little boy pays a price for tricking Diane D and her family.

Showing Doris Lessing's writing with the angry compassion of first-hand knowledge to reveal an Africa unknown to most Europeans today, this is an evocation of Africa's sounds and smells, its stark power and savage grandeur and its agony and ultimate tragedy.

"Wait Till Next Year" is the story of a young girl growing up in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, when owning a single-family home on a tree-lined street meant the realization of dreams, when everyone knew everyone else on the block, and the children gathered in the streets to play from sunup to sundown. The neighborhood was equally divided among Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans, and the corner stores were the scenes of fierce and affectionate rivalries. We meet the people who influenced Goodwin's early life: her father, who emerged from a traumatic childhood without a trace of self-pity or rancor and who taught his daughter early on that she should say whatever she thought and should bring her voice into any conversation at any time; her mother, whose heart problems left her with the arteries of a 70-year-old when she was only in her 30s and whose love of books allowed her to break the boundaries of the narrow world to which she was confined by her chronic illness; her two older sisters; her friends on the block; the local storekeepers; her school friends and teachers. This is also the story of a girlhood in which the great religious festivals of the Catholic church and the seasonal imperatives of baseball combined to produce a passionate love of history, ceremony, and ritual. It is the story of growing up in what seemed on the surface a more innocent era until one recalls the terror of polio, the paranoia of McCarthyism reflected even in the children's games, the obsession with A-bomb drills in school, and the ugly face of racial prejudice. It was a time whose relative tranquility contained the seeds of the turbulent decade of the 60s. Shortly after the Dodgers left, Goodwin'smother died, and the family moved from the old neighborhood to an apartment on the other side of town. This move coincided with the move of several other families on the block and with the decline of the corner store as the supermarket began to take over. It was the end.

Martha Quest, the embodied 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 Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence sequence 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.

This major collection contains all of Doris Lessing’s short fiction, other than the stories set in Africa, from the beginning of her career until now. Set in London, Paris, the south of France, the English countryside, these thirty-five stories reflect the themes that have always characterized Lessing’s work: the bedrock realities of marriage and other relationships between men and women; the crisis of the individual whose very psyche is threatened by a society unattuned to its own most dangerous qualities; the fate of women. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The fantastical adventures of Theodora, an anthropology student whose travels to the planet Ivory unleashes her own magical talents.

DIANE D The Musical Drama is a sequel to DIANE D In The Headlines and DANGEROUS DANA A Suspense Thriller. It is a suspense, drama, psychological, thriller about a family owned Charity and Entertainment Organization. This story involves 3 generations of the Diaz-Davidson family. The family's Charity and Entertainment Organization performs shows around the country and the world to raise money.DIANE D The Musical Drama is a musical, drama, psychological, thriller about a family owned Charity and Entertainment Organization. This story involves 3 generations of the Diaz-Davidson family. The family's Charity and Entertainment Organization performs shows around the country and the world to raise money for charity. DIANE D The Musical Drama involves fistfights, violent tempers, arrests, superhuman strength, jail time, hospitalizations and mental illness.The lead character of this story is a young, gorgeous, sexy, attractive Dominican female named Diane Denise Brown as known as Diane D. Diane D is around 24 years old. She was born in the Dominican Republic. She now lives in New York with her family and is married to Michael, a handsome black man from New York. Diane D is a professional gymnast, a professional dancer, tap dancer and a singer. She is also a personal trainer and has some background skills in the martial arts. She is a very athletic person. She also works in a hospital. On her spare time, she rides motorcycles with her Jamaican cousin Dana of ‘DANGEROUS DANA‘. Diane D’s parents, Mary and Barry and Mary’s parents, Margarita and Tomas, own and run a Charity and Entertainment Organization which was started by Margarita and Tomas back in the Dominican Republic. Diane D sings and dances on stage for her parents and grandparents’ Charity and Entertainment Organization. Her two brothers Nicolas and Mickey sing and play guitars for their family‘s organization and her husband Michael is the leader of a band that plays for the organization. The Charity and Entertainment Organization also have an All-Boys Baseball Team, an All-Boys Basketball Team, an All-Boys Dirt Bike Competition Team and an All-Boys Break Dance Team which includes around 60 boys altogether ranging from ages 10 - 14 from different backgrounds and cultures. The Charity and Entertainment Organization’s All-Boys Teams also includes a set of strikingly handsome identical twin hunks Mike and Mitch who are 12-years old. Mike and Mitch are half-white and half-Puerto Rican. They are tough. They are juvenile delinquents. They constantly get into fights with other boys. Their break dance team do break dance performances and hip-hop dancing. They also play sports with the Charity and Entertainment Organization’s All-Boys Teams like baseball, basketball and ride in the dirt motorbike competitions. They have tween girls and girls of all ages screaming for them all the time. They are young heartthrobs. Older girls even admire them. Mike and Mitch usually ignore their female admires. They have no interest in girls at the moment. They just want to be boys, hang with other boys and do boy things.Diane D, her brothers and her husband do other charity events with their family’s organization, but there is a dark side to Diane D. She has a very bad temper. She can be very violent and vicious when she is pushed. She can be a physically strong person, especially when angry, just like her cousin Dana. Diane D would get into a violent fit and vicious rage under certain circumstances. She loses her cool when she catches two of her back-up dancers drinking. She loses her cool on a TV Talk Show when male audience members ask her personal questions. She loses her cool and threatens her Jamaican lover’s girlfriend over the telephone telling the young woman that she’s going to come to her place of residence. The young woman becomes shocked when she hears Diane D describing her place of residence. She becomes horrified to discover that Diane D knows exactly where she lives and maybe even knows how she looks like, because as far as the young woman knows, Diane D has never seen or met her before, or has she.

Documents Relating to The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire is an sf novel by Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing. It concludes her five-book Canopus in Argos series & comprises a set of documents that describe the final days of the Volyen Empire, located at the edge of our galaxy & under the influence of three other galactic empires, the benevolent Canopus, the tyrannical Sirius & the malicious Shammat of Puttiora. The Sentimental Agents is a social satire written in the tradition of Jonathan Swift & George Orwell focusing on the debasement of language in political rhetoric. In this fictional universe it's propaganda that keeps fragile empires afloat. When language becomes too distorted, some succumb to a condition called "undulant rhetoric" & are placed in a Hospital for Rhetorical Diseases. Because of its focus on characterization & social/cultural issues, & no emphasis on technological details, this book is soft sf, or "space fiction" as Lessing calls her Canopus in Argos series. While The Sentimental Agents can be read as a stand-alone book, she does continue with the history of the Sirian Empire, picking up from where she left off in The Sirian Experiments ('80), 3rd book in the series.

A Stolen Generations story of astounding courage: three Aboriginal girls, taken from their mothers, escape barefoot back to their beloved homeland in East Pilbara. This is the true account of Nugi Garimara' s mother, Molly, made legendary by the film Rabbit-Proof Fence. In 1931 Molly led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1600-kilometre walk across remote Western Australia. Aged eight, eleven and fourteen, they escaped the confinement of a government institution for Aboriginal children removed from their families. Barefoot, without provisions or maps, tracked by Native Police and search planes, the girls followed the rabbit-proof fence, knowing it would lead them home. Their journey – longer than many of the celebrated treks of recognised explorers – reveals a past more cruel than we could ever imagine.

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 cast of characters--if that term can be applied to real people--includes: Bobby Brent, a con man; Mrs. Skeffington, a genteel woman who bullies her small child and flings herself down two flights of stairs to avoid having another; and Miss Priest, a prostitute, who replies to Lessing's question "Don't you ever like sex?" with "If you're going to talk dirty, I'm not interested." In swift, barbed style, in high, hard, farcical writing that is eruptively funny, Doris Lessing records the joys and terrors of everyday life. The truth of her perception shines through the pages of a work that is a brilliantpiece of cultural interpretation, an intriguing memoir and a thoroughly engaging read.

In this portrait of Doris Lessing's homeland, the author recounts the visits she made to Zimbabwe in 1982, 1988, 1989 and 1992, after being banned from the old Southern Rhodesia for 25 years for her political views and opposition to the minority white Government. The visits constitute a journey to the heart of a country whose history, landscape, people and spirit are evoked by the author in a narrative of detail. She embraces every facet of life in Zimbabwe from the lost animals in the bush to political corruption, from AIDS to a successful communal enterprise created by rural blacks, and notes the kind of changes that can only be appreciated by one who has lived there before.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, a collection of some of her finest short stories. For more than four decades, Doris Lessing’s work has observed the passion and confusion of human relations, holding a mirror up to our selves in her unflinching dissection of the everyday. From the magnificent ‘To Room Nineteen’, a study of a dry, controlled middle-class marriage ‘grounded in intelligence’, to the shocking ‘A Woman on the Roof’, where a workman becomes obsessed with a pretty sunbather, this superb collection of stories written over four decades, from the 1950s to the 1990s, bears stunning witness to Doris Lessing’s perspective on the human condition.

As the summer begins, Kate Brown -- attractive, intelligent, forty five, happily enough married, with a house in the London suburbs and three grown children -- has no reason to expect anything will change. But when the summer ends, the woman she was -- living behind a protective camouflage of feminine charm and caring -- no longer exists. This novel. Doris Lessing's brilliant excursion into the terrifying stretch of time between youth and old age, is her 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 self that lets her, finally, come truly of age. From the Paperback edition.

Two friends, two sons, two shocking and intense love affairs . . . Roz and Lil have been best friends since childhood. But their bond stretches beyond familiar bounds when these middle-aged mothers fall in love with each other's teenage sons—taboo-shattering passions that last for years, until the women end them, vowing to have a respectable old age. With Adore, Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, once again proves her unrivaled ability to capture the truth of the human condition.

A thrilling new adventure of Theodora and Ran from the author of The Gate of Ivory. Drawn back to Ivory both by her love for Ran and her fascination with magic, Theodora leaves with Ran on an investigation for a noble family, and their mission gets them trapped between the Emperor's troops and a dangerous band of outlaws.

Doris Lessing's contemporary gothic horror story—centered on the birth of a baby who seems less than human—probes society's unwillingness to recognize its own brutality. Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll of domestic bliss in defiance of the social trends of late 1960s England. While around them crime and unrest surge, the Lovatts are certain that their old-fashioned contentment can protect them from the world outside—until the birth of their fifth baby. Gruesomely goblin-like in appearance, insatiably hungry, abnormally strong and violent, Ben has nothing innocent or infant-like about him. As he grows older and more terrifying, Harriet finds she cannot love him, David cannot bring himself to touch him, and their four older children are afraid of him. Understanding that he will never be accepted anywhere, Harriet and David are torn between their instincts as parents and their shocked reaction to this fierce and unlovable child whose existence shatters their belief in a benign world.

A were-dragon? A talking tree? Saving a world she didn't know existed? ... Philomella's having an unusual day. Mystery, humour and sparkling magic combine in this middle-grade fantasy-adventure novel – perfect for fans of The World Between Blinks and The Phantom Tollbooth. When Philomella is drawn into the Impossible Forest – a place where anything can happen and usually does – she's headed for all the adventure she never wanted. There's a belligerent princess to rescue, trolls to battle and a treacherously bewitching river to cross ... and that's just for starters. They're all part of a mysterious enemy's grand plan to destroy both the Forest and Philomella – and in this world of strange and dangerous magic, she'll have to beat her deadly opponent using only her brains. And so, joined by some oddball companions (including a picnic basket with attitude, a boy whose ancestors were trees and a grandmother with...

Doris Kearns Goodwin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Team of Rivals, captures the Progressive Era through the story of the broken friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, culminating in their running against one another for president in 1912.

The fourth in Doris Lessing's visionary novel cycle Canopus in Argos: Archives. It is a mix of fable, futuristic fantasy and pseudo-documentary accounts of 20th-century history.

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the first instalment in the visionary novel cycle ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’. The story of the final days of our planet is told through the reports of Johor, an emissary sent from Canopus. Earth, now named Shikasta (the Stricken) by the kindly, paternalistic Canopeans who colonised it many centuries ago, is under the influence of the evil empire of Puttiora. War, famine, disease and environmental disasters ravage the planet. To Johor, mankind is a ‘totally crazed species’, racing towards annihilation: his orders to save humanity set him what seems to be an impossible task. Blending myth, fable and allegory, Doris Lessing’s astonishing visionary creation both reflects and redefines the history of our own world from its earliest beginnings to an inevitable, tragic self-destruction.

The Wroe Family of "The Ghostly Hideaway" faces new problems & some old ones. A long-lost aunt discovers she can talk to the ghosts but drug smuggling, murder,intrigue, crooked cops and scheming politicians combine with planned and unplanned pregnancies and a mature but sweet romance to spice up this thriller, the 2nd in a trilogy of ghost stories. Look for the 3rd, "The Phantoms' Refuge" soon.Ed & Penny Wroe and six-year-old twins, Andy & Candy, live near Fordsville, KY in a haunted house they found in the first book in this trilogy, "The Haunted Hideaway." Daughter Crissy lives nearby with new hubby, Johnny O'Reilly. Ed & Johnny have a new employee in their carpenter business who ends up being shot. A long-lost aunt discovers she can communicate with the Wroe's resident ghosts. The twins find their very own ghost and Shadowhawk needs their help badly. These ghostly happenings along with heroin smuggling, murder, crooked cops and scheming politicians, one planned pregnancy and another definitely unplanned along with a mature but very sweet romance, spice up this thriller which switches locales between Laredo, TX and the Kentucky Haunted Hideout.Coming soon: the third book in the trilogy, "The Phantoms' Refuge."

The second volume of Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories, and a classic work from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. "As for these stories – when I write one, it is as if I open a gate into a landscape which is always there. Time has nothing to do with it. A certain kind of pulse starts beating, and I recognise it: it is time I wrote another story from that landscape, external and internal at the same time, which was once the Old Chief’s Country." — Doris Lessing, from the Preface. This much-acclaimed collection of stories vividly evokes both the grandeur of Africa and the glare of its sun and the wide open space, as well as the great, irresolvable tensions between whites and blacks. Tales of poor white farmers and their lonely wives, of storm air thick with locusts, of ants and pomegranate trees, black servants and the year of hunger in a native village – all combine to present a powerful image of a continent which seems incorruptible in spite of all the people who plough, mine and plunder it to make their living. In Doris Lessing’s own words, "Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape."

DANGEROUS DANA A Suspense Thriller is a sequel to DIANE D The Musical Drama, DIANE D In The Headlines and DIANE D And The Other Personality. It is a mystery, suspense, psychological, thriller about a young gorgeous Caribbean woman living in New York who gets revenge by killing people, living a secret double life as a murderer.DANGEROUS DANA involves chasings, fistfights, chokings, stalkings, arrests, jail time, prison time and a series of murders. Dana has a violent temper. She is known for hardly ever smiling. She believes in revenge and will go after her target. At night, she would dress in a disguise like a black hat, black jacket, black scarf around the bottom of her face, black gloves, black pants, thick black shoes and dark shades when she stalks and follows her victims.Dana is not the kind of person who goes around looking for trouble, but if it happens to come her way or any member in her family’s way, she will become a psychopath and respond with violence. Dana fights like a boxer and believes in fighting fire with fire. Is she a savior, or is she a psycho? Is she a vigilante, or is she a homicidal maniac?

A visionary novel from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is sooner than you might think. And the Earth’s climate is much changed – it’s colder than ever before in the north, and unbearably dry and hot in the south. Mara, who is seven, and her four-year-old brother Dann find themselves somewhere very strange, not home … They are taken in by a kindly, grandmotherly woman, but this new life is hard: hunger, dirt, thirst and danger are the children’s constant companions. Drought and fire carry off their adoptive home and force them to set off northward into the unknown, to experience a series of adventures that bring them to an altogether altered world, where they can start to learn and build anew. Doris Lessing has written a compelling, troubling and entertaining novel that, through the remarkable odyssey of a brother and sister living in the imagined future, manages to tell us a great deal about the present we perceive only dimly and scarcely know how to value.

HardPress Classic Books Series

A fascinating look inside the mind of a man who is supposedly "mad."

Doris Glick’s Amish beau was convicted of car theft and is in prison. Her parents are distressed about their relationship; indeed, the entire district is upset with Jordan. But Doris is undeterred. She loves Jordan Lehman and is determined to remain loyal to him. She’s sure that when they hear the complete story of what happened, everything will be cleared up. She only prays Jordan will be released by Christmas. After all, isn’t Christmas the time to be together?Doris’s cousin Matthew—who in the strictest sense, isn’t truly related to her—is more upset than anyone about Doris’s courtship with Jordan. But he can never reveal his true reason. No one would understand his affection for Doris, nor would they accept it. As Christmas approaches, he realizes that there is only one decision he can really make… Now, he just has to make it.

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.

It is 1968 during a decade that has been labelled one of the most turbulent in history. The headlines are bold with many social and political movements happening including the Women's Rights Movement, the Viet Nam War, Freedom Marches, segregation in our schools, and so on. There is a gas shortage, and businesses are shutting down. Our president, John Kennedy, had been assassinated just a few years earlier, and people were still coping with that and wondering if our leaders are safe now.In this novel, author Doris Wilbur, immerses her characters into those true-life events. Samuel and Josie with their two young children must relocate to Washington, D.C. It is an exciting change from their quiet, predictable life in the country. Washington is a vibrant, international city full of possibilities. Both are soon on career paths to a higher standard of living but without realizing it, they are residents in a laboratory for protests, change, danger, violence, and...

Love, Again tells the story of a 65-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 28-year-old Bill, and then with the more mature 35-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.

Doris Glick’s beau has been released from prison—and just in time for Christmas. Doris is sure that now everything will be fine. Life can return to normal, and she and Jordan can continue their courtship, with Christmas promising to be especially dear. But Doris is wrong. Dreadfully wrong. Nothing goes as she hopes. Jordan has changed—and not in a good way. She hardly knows him anymore.Matthew Wanner, Doris’s best friend and adopted cousin, begins to court his girlfriend in earnest. Doris wants to be happy for him, but she struggles. When she discovers why, her entire world tilts, and she is blindsided.Where is the promise of Christmas? Where is the joy and peace and love that Doris seeks? Join Doris as she struggles with false hope and broken dreams—join her as she learns that truth can truly set a person free.

Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is both a riveting chronicle of human disintegration and a beautifully understated social critique. Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of an enigmatic and virile black servant, Moses. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses -- master and slave -- are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion. Their psychic tension explodes in an electrifying scene that ends this disturbing tale of racial strife in colonial South Africa. The Grass Is Singing blends Lessing's imaginative vision with her own vividly remembered early childhood to recreate the quiet horror of a woman's struggle against a ruthless fate.

Third in a dynamic new series where magic and science meet, following The Gate of Ivory and Two-Bit Heroes. Quiet, scholarly Theodora of Pyrene is lured to the exotic and treacherous Ivory where she and Ran, the leader of a powerful family of sorcerers, must prove they are innocent of killing a member of an aristocratic family.

Stranded by mischance on the planet Ivory, Theodora of Pyrene uses her small talent to read fortunes to support herself until a commission by a sorcerer of the powerful Cormallon family involves her in a web of deceit and murder on a world where magic and technology combine forces. Romantic suspense and exotic local color lend spice to this sf/fantasy debut. For most fantasy collections.

A New York Times Notable Book: One woman's search for the value of a long life With the advent of her seventieth birthday, many changes have beset Doris Grumbach: the rapidly accelerating speed of the world around her, the premature deaths of her younger friends, her own increasing infirmities, and her move from cosmopolitan Washington, DC, to the calm of the Maine coast. Coming into the End Zone is an account of everything Grumbach observes over the course of a year. Astute observations and vivid memories of quotidian events pepper her story, which surprises even her with its fullness and vigor. Coming into the End Zone captures the days of a woman entering a new stage of life with humanity and abiding hope.

Lie back and think of England. She could do this. It was only sex, after all. Auctioning off her virginity was the easy part—going through with it not so easy. When Alice realizes who has acquired her, keeping her emotions out of the deal seems an impossible task.Self-made billionaire Lakota, Lance Kemnay has no time for women, let alone one who would sell her virginity to the highest bidder. Ever practical, however, he sees in Alice a solution to his immediate need for a wife. The emotions she stirs in him are just lust, and lust can be dealt with. As they connect emotionally and physically, his resolve to keep his heart aloof is tested beyond limits.Can he trust his tender feelings, or has he been taken for a fool by the one woman he thought he could trust?

The ability to see other-dimensional rings that float in Earth's atmosphere was a late mutation of a few space-age humans. Daryl was under the care of the institution for muters, and she had discovered that if you jumped through the right ring at the right time it would land you in another dimensional world and another shape. Spaceling is the story of Daryl's desperate efforts to unravel the mystery of why she was being held captive and of what was really going on in a certain alien dimension. Because she was sure it was all bad and that someday everyone would thank her for the revelation. But instead everyone was engaged in a wild effort to hold her down, to keep her on this Earth, and to keep the world simply intact!

It's a dismal day that doesn't include a dose of Doris' - Press and Journal Willie Fowlie's grandmother calls him a 'nickum' - he is a mischievous Aberdeenshire boy who often acts instinctively, bearing little or no consideration for the consequences of his actions. When he is eleven, his playful antics lead to a full-blown murder enquiry, but it is soon recognised that the hunt is based on nothing more material than Willie's imagination. Four years later, however, Willie witnesses a real murder, but believing that his eye-witness testimony is simply another fabrication, the police wind down the investigation. It is not until five years later, during World War II, that Willie is able to prove the sincerity of his account and the murderer is apprehended. Despite his errant ways, Willie's headmaster recognises his potential and finances his matriculation at University along with his own daughter, Millie, in late September 1939. Free from the constraints of their childhood, the...

The moving portrait of a woman stranded in her lonely fame Franny Fuller, blond, buxom, and beguiling, is the sort of woman who harnesses a power that can enthrall a nation. The legendary movie star has captured the imaginations of audiences, men, and columnist Mary Maguire, who is writing her biography. But just who is the human within the celebrity? This is the story of how Fanny Marker from Utica, New York, was transformed into Franny Fuller—a famous actress with a life of private misery. Doris Grumbach takes readers beyond the glamour of the silver screen with this poignant novel of one woman's sad reality.

Doris Glick’s beau has done more than enough to cause pain to his family and everyone in the district. Surely, he is finished causing upset. But no… Now, his carelessness lands him in the hospital. Doris is beside herself. She’s tired of making excuses for him, tired of defending him, tired of him.But how can she break up with him when he’s hurt? What kind of person would she be? The only person she really wants to confide in is her adopted cousin, Matthew Wanner. As Christmas approaches, she becomes more and more drawn to Matthew. What kind of holiday can it be, when everything is in such a mess?Matthew is moving quickly toward asking Annie Hersberger to marry him. While Doris does her best to support him, her heart is breaking. Has she trapped herself with a beau she doesn’t love? Will she ever find the courage to confess to Matthew how she really feels?

A novella and collection of short stories by Scotland's favourite novelist. Two men sit petrified on Christmas Eve at the thought of spending it in supernatural company; a young family makes a tense Cross-channel trip in fear of some unspecified threat; an old man contemplates jumping to his death at the thought of being evicted from the house in which he has lived all his life. In this book, Doris Davidson looks back over an immensely successful writing career in a collection of twenty short stories, which also includes her eagerly awaited latest work, the novella "Duplicity". Covering a wide range of themes and moods, these stories are a wonderful tribute to the skill and imagination of one of Scotland's best-loved authors.

In this culmination of five decades of acclaimed studies in presidential history, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin offers an illuminating exploration into the early development, growth, and exercise of leadership.Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the man make the times or do the times make the man? In Leadership, Goodwin draws upon four of the presidents she has studied most closely—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)—to show how they first recognized leadership qualities within themselves, and were recognized by others as leaders. No common pattern describes the trajectory of leadership. Although set apart in background, abilities, and temperament, these men shared a fierce ambition and a deep-seated resilience that enabled them to surmount uncommon adversity. At their best,...

Love, Again is Doris Lessing's first novel since The Fifth Child in 1988. It is based around the discovery of the journals of Julie Vairon, an intelligent and lovely but wayward French girl from Martinique, brought to Provence at the end of the nineteenth century by one of her devoted lovers. Julie was a musician, a diarist, an artist, a 'free woman' ahead of her time. Nearly eighty years after her death in 1912, her music and her art illuminate the lives of the characters of Love, Again , when Sarah Durham, a theatrical producer, commissions a play based on her life. The play captivates all who come into contact with it, and dramatically changes the lives of everyone involved. For Sarah — an old woman — the change is profound; she falls in love with two younger men, one after the other, causing her to relive her own stages of growing up, from immature and infantile love (the beautiful and androgynous Bill) to the mature love, Henry.

Two young men from a remote Scottish village decide to make their fortunes in London, but can't escape their close ties to home or the girl they leave behind... Alistair Ritchie and Dougal Finnie have grown up in one of the most scenic villages in Scotland, but as they now have a desire to see the world, there is nothing to keep them there – not even Lexie Fraser, who's been chasing Ally since they were fourteen. Lexie has troubles of her own: a sick mother and a missing father, his disappearance a complete mystery. She'd like nothing better than to cling to Ally, which just makes him more determined to break free. But the lads aren't destined to stay away forever. Marriage and babies follow – and so does war. London is no place for young wives and children, and where could be safer than the north of Scotland, the Back of Beyond? But what will their city-raised families make of it – and the folks they left behind?

<div>Skipping to School is the true story of a childhood spent in Liverpool before, during and after the Second World War. It recalls the fabric of everyday life on the home front and the impact of war on both family life and the local community. At home in Walton, Doris and her friends learned slogans such as 'Make Do and Mend', 'Dig for Victory' and 'Careless Talk Costs Lives'. They collected shell caps from bombs and did swaps for better, shinier ones. They made skipping ropes out of the twisted silk cords of German parachutes. They were excited by the arrival of American soldiers stationed on Aintree Racecourse. And, despite the raids, they lauhged and had fun.</div>

The sequel to her novel 'Brow of the Gallowgate', Doris Davidson's latest novel follows the fortunes of the Ogilvie family through the World War II. Olive is determined to have her cousin Neil as her husband and won't allow anything or anyone to get in her way. So when her younger cousin Queenie is evacuated from London and begins to attract Neil's attention, Olive does all she can to avert the relationship. When warnings and threats fail, Olive concocts a web of lies to blacken Queenie's character and destroy her cousins' love. Despite Olive's success, her actions fail to secure Neil, who finds himself involved with other girls, finally meeting and falling for Freda. After this Olive will stop at nothing, no matter how despicable, to make sure Neil is hers forever. The consequences of her actions shock everyone and send the extended Potter and Ogilvie families into turmoil.

The Shadow of the Sycamores traces the fortunes of the Rae family, from Henry Rae's birth in 1871, when his drunken father, a blacksmith, forgets the name chosen for him, to his old age in the 1940s. We follow Henry's story as he leaves home at 13 to work as orra loon at a farm and eventually meets his beloved future wife, Fay, when he finds a new job at The Sycamores, a nursing home for the mentally disordered and the elderly. Events take a dramatic turn when their son, Jerry, under-gardener at The Sycamores, falls in love with a 16-year-old inmate. When they marry, another inmate a much older man becomes insanely jealous and the scene is set for tragedy, with three mysterious deaths. Jerry enlists in 1917 and is killed in action. Years later, the family find unfamiliar marriage and birth certificates amongst his personal effects and start to unravel the mystery surrounding his second wife and child. This leads to a shocking discovery and there are many twists and turns before...

Ashlin had been climbing Mt. Timbrini for more than a decade. Scaling the huge, befogged escarpment he liked to gaze down upon the city of Emera glittering below like a thousand multi-colored moons.But when horrifying visions of gaps in the fabric of sky above the mountain began to plague his nights, and the mysterious appearance of a woman on a section of the heights he knew to be unreachable baffled his daytime ascents, his motivation for climbing began to change.He did not realize that his newly motivated enterprise would not bring him peace of mind, but a dire and dangerous battle for the peace of a world!Reviewer comments on Doris Piserchia:“DAW has brought a new author to deserved prominence.”—Toronto Star“Piserchia is not one of the best-known names in the SF field—but she should be!”—Questar“Doris Piserchia cares.”—The Twilight Zone