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"Doris Lessing has a powerful voice and a particular one. It speaks in anger at the distortion of personal relations ion a unsound society, but speaks it with a wit that manages to be both pitiless and compassionate." -- Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times The stories and sketches in this collection penetrate to the heart of human experience with the passion and intelligence readers have come to expect of Doris Lessing. Most of the pieces are set in contemporary London, a city the author loves for its variety, its diversity, the way it connects the life of animals and birds in the parks to the streets. Lessing's fiction also explores the darker corners of relationships between women and men, as in the rich and emotionally complex title story, in which she uncovers a more parlous reality behind the façade of the most conventional relationship between the sexes.… (more)
User reviews
This is a collection of stories set in London. Heavy on mother/daughter stuff, and animals. Good.
I have a very
The collection is diverse - the back of the book will try to tell you it's about the diversity of London, or about men and women, or about "personal relationships in a unsound society". It's not any of those things, or perhaps it's all of them. The "Sketches" part of the title seems the most appropriate description - sketches of people and places written by a perceptive and imaginative woman.