UNDER MY SKIN - Harper Collins

This, the first volume of Doris Lessings's autobiography, begins with her childhood in Africa and ends in 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. 'This 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-