The Summer Before the Dark (Flamingo Modern Classic) - Softcover

Lessing, Doris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586088997 ISBN 13: 9780586088999

Publisher: Flamingo, 1995

Synopsis

The story of a middle-aged woman's search for freedom from Doris Lessing, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her four children have flown, her husband is otherwise occupied, and after twenty years of being a good wife and mother, Kate Brown is free for a summer of adventure. She plunges into an affair with a younger man, travelling abroad with him, and on her return to England, meets an extraordinary young woman whose charm and freedom of spirit encourages Kate in her own liberation. Kate's new life has brought her a strange unhappiness, but as the summer months unfold, a darker, disquieting journey begins, devastating in its consequences.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

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.

"A splendid and serious novel that reminds one once again of just how much the fictive imagination can order and enrich experience." ? National Observer

"Lessing's prose has the nervous intensity and quick, impressionistic lightness of some of D. H. Lawrence's later work. We are caught up in a rush of strong feeling."? Walter Clemons, Newsweek

"(A) masterpiece...probably the best book she has written." ? ?

From the Back Cover:

"A splendid and serious novel that reminds one once again of just how much the fictive imagination can order and enrich experience." -- National Observer

"Lessing's prose has the nervous intensity and quick, impressionistic lightness of some of D. H. Lawrence's later work. We are caught up in a rush of strong feeling."

-- Walter Clemons, Newsweek

"(A) masterpiece...probably the best book she has written." -- The Economist

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0586088997
• ISBN 13: 9780586088999
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240