The golden notebook - Doris Lessing

One of Doris Lessing's most important works, exploring politics, feminism, motherhood and the intellectual climate of the 1950s.

Anna Wulf is a young novelist with writer's block. Divorced, with a young child, and disillusioned by unsatisfactory relationships, she feels her life is falling apart. In fear of madness, she records her experiences in four coloured notebooks. The black notebook addresses her problems as a writer; the red her political life; the yellow her relationships and emotions; and the blue becomes a diary of everyday events. But it is the fifth notebook - the Golden Notebook - which is the key to her recovery and renaissance.

Bold and illuminating, fusing sex, politics, madness and motherhood, 'The Golden Notebook' is at once a wry and perceptive portrait of the intellectual and moral climate of the 1950s - a society on the brink of feminism - and a powerful and revealing account of a woman searching for her own personal and political identity.