The Four Gated City (Harperperennial) - (Children of Violence) by Doris Lessing (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way, and it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do." -- Barbara Kingsolver

The Children of Violence series, a quintet of novels tracing the life of Martha Quest, from her childhood in Africa to a post-nuclear Britain of AD 2000, first established Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, as a great radical writer.

In this, the fifth and final volume, Marth, now middle-aged, leaves Africa for post-war London. As housekeeper to the Coldridge family, she watches the children in her care, the new 'children of violence', grow up in a disintegrating world, a world careering toward nuclear disaster.

From the Back Cover

Dorris Lessing's classic series of autobiographical novels is the fictional counterpart to Under My Skin. In these five novels, first published in the 1950's and 60s, Doris Lessing transformed her fascinating life into fiction, creating her most complex and compelling character, Martha Quest.

Review Quotes

"I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way, and it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do." -- Barbara Kingsolver

"A powerful, prophetic, mysterious work, a truly extraordinary novel....The insanity of the 20th century...[and] the mystery of the self, explored brilliantly here as it is in her other masterpiece The Golden Notebook....Here is a book not to be read, but experienced." -- Joyce Carol Oates

"One of the most remarkable feats in contemporary fiction." -- Chicago Daily News