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The Summer Before the Dark (Flamingo Modern Classic)
 
 
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The Summer Before the Dark (Flamingo Modern Classic) [Paperback]

Doris Lessing
2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Flamingo; (Reissue) edition (17 Jun 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0586088997
  • ISBN-13: 978-0586088999
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 1.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 392,098 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Doris May Lessing
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Product Description

Review

‘This is probably the best book Doris Lessing has ever written. It would be a deprivation not to read it at once.’ Economist

‘An honest, perceptive, serious book.’ Irish Times

‘Painfully, poignantly authentic.’ David Lodge, New Statesman

‘A summer journey of self-discovery which ends amazingly, in an act of self-definition so searching, so acute and total, one puts down the book shaken, enlarged, in awe. It is an ostensibly simple story, simply told, developing all the way and deepening: the particular universalised in a narrative of compelling power. No wonder Mrs Lessing has been spoken of in the same breath as Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn.’ Sunday Times

Product Description

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.


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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I had read this book years ago and been very struckby it. Reading this again, the month of my own retirement, I was struck again by Lessing's ability to present us with obvious facts about western human reaction and behaviour that we never notice til she points them out.
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By Ohne
Format:Paperback
Several positive critiques and reviews made me curious about this book of Nobel prize winner Doris Lessing.
With high expectations I started reading - and was bitterly disappointed. And that from every point of view. The language is difficult (which surely is not due to the fact that English is not my mother tongue), the story is boring, diffuse, dull, elusive and not in the least inspiring. Of all that was announced on the cover there is nothing to be found in the book. I conceived reading as painful and was extraordinarily happy that the book comprises of "only" 288 pages.
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6 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Dissapointing 9 Feb 2007
By Tamara
Format:Paperback
I have read several of Doris Lessing's books and enjoyed them, so I was looking forward to this read, especially reading the synopsis which sounded intriguing. However, I was dissapointed. I found the language wordy and pretentious, as if Lessing was trying to 'live up' to her intelletctual image, but I stuck to it hoping things would improve, which they didn't. I found the characters irritating, with little depth (her young lover is a totally cardboard character and we learn nothing about him or any feelings she has for him), the situations utterly unrealistic, and the ending, after expecting the 'devastating consequences' we are told about, a complete let down. Sorry Doris, you didn't do it for me this time.
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