In this ambitious novel of madness and release, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Doris Lessing imagines the fantastical "inner-space" life of an amnesiac.
Charles Watkins, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, has suffered a breakdown, confined to a mental hospital as his friends and doctors attempt to bring him back to reality. But Watkins has embarked on a tremendous pyschological adventure that takes him from a spinning raft in the Atlantic to a ruined stone city on a tropical island to an outer-space journey through singing planets. As he travels in his mind through memory...

Nobel laureate Doris Lessing's classic novel of the pivotal summer in one woman's life is a brilliant excursion into the terrifying gulf between youth and old age.
As the summer begins, Kate Brown--attractive, intelligent, forty-five, happily married, with a house in the London suburbs and three grown children--has no reason to expect that anything will change. But by summer's end the woman she was--living behind a protective camouflage of feminine charm and caring--no longer exists. The Summer Before the Dark""takes us along on Kate's journey: from London to Turkey to Spain, from husband...