Adoration

This collection of four novellas includes ‘The Grandmothers’, on which ‘Adoration’, a major film starring Naomi Watts and Robin Wright, is based. (Please note, this collection was previously published as ‘The Grandmothers’.)

‘The Grandmothers’ is the story of two women who meet as schoolgirls and, in later life, live next-door to each other as neighbours. When their marriages collapse, each finds herself infatuated with the other’s son. This is a searingly intimate portrait of an unconventional extended family and the lengths to which people will go to find happiness and love. It is a ruthless dissection of the veneer of middle-class conventions that manages to be at once universal and heartbreakingly personal.

With ‘The Grandmothers’, as well as the other novellas in this collection – ‘Victoria and the Staveneys’, ‘The Reason for It’ and ‘A Love Child’ – Doris Lessing proves once again that she is one of our most valuable and insightful living authors.

Reviews

‘“The Grandmothers” is a feast from life’s long banqueting table.’ Maggie Gee, Independent

‘The strangeness, the waywardness, the difficulty, and sometimes the cruelty of love – this is one of Doris Lessing’s central and recurrent subjects, which she explores better than anyone else now writing. Her gaze is so steady, her judgement so sure, her sympathy so wide. She is the most incredible of writers.’ Allan Massie, Scotsman

‘In these four tales she shows her adaptability, and her capacity to unify the most far-flung territories of human experience. Like all great writers, she brings a multitudinous sensibility to bear on individual people, on single rooms, on particular moments – and she makes them live.’ Rachel Cusk, Daily Telegraph

‘Lessing’s prose is as vigorous in these stories as it has ever been. Like D. H. Lawrence, she has an extraordinary feel not only for landscape but also for the human creature within it.’ Helen Dunmore, The Times

‘Superb. “A Love Child” is a simple story but Lessing makes it the vehicle for a rich freight of ideas and impressions. With admirable economy she summons up the peculiar atmosphere of 1930s Britain – the older generation still shocked and intimidated by the previous war, the younger driven a little crazy by the prospect of the next. It is a short fiction, but Lessing has given it all the ironies and sorrowful wisdom that belong to long duration, the sense of gradual change and of inevitable loss balanced by the slow acquisition of a fully adult sensitivity. There is not only a whole life here, but a whole interconnected web of lives.’ Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times

About the author

Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her first novel, 'The Grass is Singing', was published in 1950. Among her other celebrated novels are 'The Golden Notebook', 'The Fifth Child' and 'Memoirs of a Survivor'. She has also published two volumes of her autobiography, 'Under my Skin' and 'Walking in the Shade'. Doris Lessing died on 17 November 2013 at the age of 94.