Product Description

A fierce, compelling account of the nature and origins of love from Doris Lessing, one of the most acclaimed authors of the twentieth-century and Winner of the Nobel Pize for Literature 2007. Sarah Durham, sixty-year-old producer and founder of a leading fringe theatre company, commissions a play based on the journals of Julie Vairon, a beautiful, wayward nineteenth-century mulatto woman. It captivates all who come into contact with it, and dramatically changes the lives of all those who take part in it. For Sarah the changes are profound - she falls in love with two younger men causing her to relive her own stages of growing up, from immature, infantile with the beautifual and androgynous Bill, to the mature love, Henry.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #193714 in Books
• Published on: 1997-03-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
'"Love, Again" grips, maddens, depresses and excites the reader from the first page to the last. A. S. Byatt, The Times 'A grand novel, boldly hewn ! An encounter with a magnificent mind and temperament in artistic maturity, capable of turning her equal gaze on George Eliot.' Independent on Sunday 'I have never seen love's effects and depredations described in more minute detail ! a wholly compelling book, as vigorous and thought-provoking as anything she has ever written.' New Statesman 'By restoring love to the centre of the novel, Lessing has written a book that readers will love; a novel that Stendhal and Colette would have been proud to have written.' Scotsman

About the Author
Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her first novel, 'The Grass is Singing', was published in 1950. Among her other celebrated novels are 'The Golden Notebook', 'The Fifth Child' and 'Memoirs of a Survivor'. She has also published two volumes of her autobiography, 'Under my Skin' and 'Walking in the Shade'. Her most recent novel is 'The Cleft'.

Customer Reviews

A very good book about love
I have read most of Doris Lessings books, and they have always meant a lot to me. She writes with an honesty that I have only found in a few other authors. (Axel Sandemose is another).I read "Marta Quest" in my teens, and it helped me understand a lot of things. Now I read "Love, again" book as a middle-aged woman, and I got the same feeling of having learned something about myself, and of not being alone. It is an unusual book about love. It is not only about relationships but about the feeling of love itself.

Difficult
I must admit that I found this book hard going. I was more than half way through it before I began to wonder what might happen to the characters. The main character, Sarah, is a woman of 60 who mixes in theatrical circles, the book is full of literary quotes and references which I didn't recognise, and Sarah seems absorbed in self-analysis for too much of the time.
The book does have some telling insights into how it feels to be infatuated with someone, and how it feels to be depressed. There are also some beautiful descriptions of nature. Little bits of it will stay with me, but it doesn't make me want to read any of her other books.