The Grandmothers: Four Short Novels

Here is yet more evidence that this writer of enormous insight and prodigious talent should have won the Nobel Prize decades ago. – Chicago Tribune

Shocking, intimate, often uncomfortably honest, these stories reaffirm Doris Lessing’s unequalled ability to capture the truth of the human condition.

In the title novel, two friends fall in love with each other’s teenage sons, and these passions last for years, until the women end them, vowing a respectable old age. In Victoria and the Staveneys, a young woman gives birth to a child of mixed race and struggles with feelings of estrangement as her daughter gets drawn into a world of white privilege. The Reason for It traces the birth, faltering, and decline of an ancient culture, with enlightening modern resonances. A Love Child features a World War II soldier who believes he has fathered a love child during a fleeting wartime romance and cannot be convinced otherwise.