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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)

by Doris May Lessing (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
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Frequently Bought Together

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Price For All Three: £17.96

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Product details

  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Flamingo; New edition 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: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 339,428 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #49 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > L > Lessing, Doris

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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

3 Reviews
5 star:
 (1)
4 star:    (0)
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2 star:
 (2)
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Average Customer Review
3.0 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Boring and dated, 22 Oct 2008
By David Morley (Brighton, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
I bought this after reading the brilliant Grass is Singing and what a dissapointment. I imagine this novel was relvant at its time but now it just seems "so what" and I gave up a third of the way through. A woman in her early 40s falls into a well paid job and is shocked to have an identiy other than "wife and mother". She goes to a confernece and has an affair with someone about ten years younger than herself. Wow, a woman in her early 40s like gets a job!

The reason the novel is so uninvolving is that we are told very little about what the characters actually do and instead get pages and pages of what the woman, Kate, thinks . This may show the author to be clever but you don't develop any empathy or interest for the character. Also I think my edition needed some proof reading.
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6 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Dissapointing, 9 Feb 2007
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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5.0 out of 5 stars The Summer before the Dark, 24 Aug 2009
By E. Dodwell "Eithne" (UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Summer Before the Dark (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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