The Golden Notebook

This ambitious novel has no equal. Guardian At the beginning of the Sixties, this vast, frank, complicated novel helped to sustain our reputation for courageous, ambitious, experimental writing. Soon a worldwide bestseller, it is still Lessings finest work. The Golden Notebook captured the heady mix of the early Sixties, when not just novels but political certainties were dissolving. The rising feminist movement seized it as a Bible. Mail on Sunday Her greatest workShows the power of the female imagination at full throttle. It doesn't bear a simple political message but it does rip off the masks that women were accustomed to wearing, and it shows up the dangers and difficulties that women encounter if they try to live a free life in a man's worldA landmark novel, a book that both changed and explained a generationOne of the finest writers of the century. Independent Doris Lessing is a pioneer of feminist self-consciousness in its raw stateThe truths contained in The Golden Notebook are indeed harsh. It can also be said that these particular truths have not been examined in so rigorous and exemplary a fashion since the first appearance of this extraordinary book. A seminal work. Anita Brookner, LRB The Golden Notebook is the diary of a writer in shock, a young woman determined to forge a life as a free woman, as an intellectual. Doris Lessing is a writer of considerable power, someone who can close her eyes and give a situation by the sheer force of her emotional energy. Joan Didion, New York Times

Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007, is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of recent decades. A Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature, she has been awarded the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spains Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award and the S. T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetimes Distinguished Service to Literature, as well as a host of other international awards. Doris Lessing died on 17 November 2013.