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Published Aug 2008
288 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
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 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, each 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, spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital after her great love, a doctor, drowned in the Channel.
In the fictional first half of Alfred and Emily, Doris Lessing imagines the happier lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war; a story that begins with their meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester. This is followed by a piercing examination of their relationship as it actually was in the shadow of the Great War, of the family's move to Africa, and of the impact of her parents' marriage on a young woman growing up in a strange land.
"Here I still am," says Doris Lessing, "trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free." Triumphantly, with the publication of Alfred and Emily, she has done just that.
"At age 89, the author may be slowing down a trifle, but the best parts here are as bracing and engaging as anything she's written in the past 30 years." - Kirkus Reviews.
"Lessing's longtime readers will find little new in her autobiographical disclosures, and new readers will look in vain for the talent that won the Nobel." - Publishers Weekly.
"Starred Review. This unusual marriage of fiction and memoir (and family photographs) results in a book at once spellbinding, rueful, and tragic." - Booklist.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Doris Lessing was born in 1919. The Grass Is Singing was published in 1950, and since then she went on to publish more than fifty books. Named a Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature in Great Britain, she has been awarded the David Cohen British Literature Prize, Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award, and the S. T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in November 2013.
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