10% off all books and free delivery over £40
Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.

Alfred and Emily

View All Editions

£9.99 £8.99

We can order this from the publisher. Usually dispatched within 15 working days

Add To Wishlist
Write A Review

About

Alfred and Emily Synopsis

Doris Lessing’s first book after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature revisits her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents led. ‘I think my father'’s rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.’ In this extraordinary book, Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In the first half of this book, Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket match as children but leading separate lives. This is followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came to be in the shadow of that war, their move to Rhodesia, a damaged couple hulking over Lessing’s childhood in a strange land. ‘Here I still am,’ says Doris Lessing, ‘trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.’

About This Edition

ISBN: 9780007240173
Publication date: 5th March 2009
Author: Doris Lessing
Publisher: HarperPerennial an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Format: Paperback
Pagination: 288 pages
Genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction
Shorter Reads
First World War
Memoirs
Autobiography: historical, political and military
True stories of heroism, endurance and survival
True war and combat stories
War and defence operations