by Lessing (Author)
The fifth and final book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner's `Children of Violence' series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.
`The Four-Gated City' finds Martha Quest in 1950s London and very much part of the social history of the time: the Cold War, the anti-nuclear Aldermaston Marches, Swinging London, the deepening of poverty and social anarchy. Daring to go a step further - as Lessing so often has in her career - the novel ends with the century in the throes of World War Three.
In the four previous novels of the `Children of Violence' series, Lessing explored the end of an epoch. Here she trains her gaze on the present - and the future. The disquieting power of her vision revealed across this series finds its culmination in this brave and visionary work.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 668
Edition: New e.
Publisher: Flamingo
Published: 07 May 2010
ISBN 10: 0586090037
ISBN 13: 9780586090039
`I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do.' Barbara Kingsolver
`The Children of Violence series gives an astounding compression of a total, coherent vision, as if Doris Lessing knew all along where it would end.' The Times