The Golden Notebook: Perennial Classics edition

"The Golden Notebook is Doris Lessing's most important work and has left its mark upon the ideas and feelings of a whole generation of women." — New York Times Book Review

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna resolves to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

Lessing's best-known and most influential novel, The Golden Notebook retains its extraordinary power and relevance decades after its initial publication.

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier year. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine reviles part of her own experience. And in the blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

“Lessing writes about her own sex with the unrelenting intensity of Simone de Beauvoir, and about sex itself with the frankness and detail of John O.” - Washington Post

“A work of high seriousness . . . The most absorbing and exciting piece of new fiction I have read in a decade; it moves with the beat of our time, and it is true.” - Irving Howe, The New Republican

“No ordinary work of fiction...the technique, in a word, is brilliant, and places Doris Lessing in the forefront of British novelists.” - Saturday Review

"The most absorbing and exciting piece of new fiction I have read in a decades; it moves with the beat of our time, and it is true." - Irving Howe, New Republic

“This exciting writer has tried much, aimed high, and has paraded a galaxy of gifts.” - Baltimore Sun