Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 - Tapa dura

This, the first volume of Doris Lessing's autobiography, begins with her childhood in Africa and ends on her arrival in London in 1949 with the typescript of her first novel, 'The Grass is Singing', in her suitcase. It charts the evolution first of her consciousness, then of her sexuality and finally of her political awareness with an almost overwhelming immediacy, and is as distinctive and challenging as anything she has ever written. It is already recognised as one of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century.

'In this immediate, vivid, beautifully paced memoir, Doris Lessing sets the individual against history, the personal against the general and shows, by the example of her life set down honestly, how biography and fiction mesh, how fiction transmutes the personal to the general, how the particular experience illuminates the universe. By putting her life on the page, she has created her greatest work of art.'
HILARY MANTEL, 'London Review of Books'

'The book pulsates with life. The intensity of the sensory world is brilliantly evoked. The bush, the freedom to explore, the wonder of her world, are beautifully described. Not just the story of the first thirty years of one life, this is the biography also of an age.'
JANE DUNN, 'Observer'

'No mere review can do justice to an autobiography which is not just about a particular childhood but about all childhoods, not just about white marginality, but about all forms of interior exile, rebellion, subversion and secret self-making. A voice of wise and fearless honesty cuts through this book, the best Doris Lessing has ever written.'
LYNDALL GORDON, 'Times Higher Education Supplement'