Intimate encounter with one of the twentieth century’s most challenging and influential novelists, Doris Lessing. 2007’s Nobel Prize winner for Literature, she is both ‘hostess’ and ‘alien’ – the hostess, who presents a public face to the world, and the private person who writes, dreams and ‘experiments with her life’.
Alan Yentob makes the tea in the kitchen of this unself-censored 88-year-old, whose ‘myth country’ is still the African bush where she was brought up. All her life she has been fighting her mother, about whom – as about everything – she is refreshingly frank. Feminism, communism, Sufism, science fiction – we hear her opinions and those of some she has influenced.
“Jill Nicholls crafted a compelling, even challenging, portrait of a completely original artist”The Independent
“Armed with a cup of tea and nothing to prove, Doris Lessing
addressed her past with a vivid wit.”Lucy Mangan, The Guardian
“captivating”Time Out
” … a definite hit …”Telegraph
[…] Doris Lessing: The Hostess and the Alien […]