Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962

Doris Lessing's long-awaited follow-up to the first part of her autobiography, the hugely successful Under My Skin.

In Walking in the Shade we move into the dazzling heyday of Lessing's career, sparked off by the international success of her first novel, The Grass is Singing, in 1950.

A wonderful evocation of London?s literary and political life during the 1950s and 1960s. Doris Lessing was at the very centre of the intellectual scene at that time and knew many of its personalities and opinion-makers - Kenneth Tynan, John Osborne, E.P. Thompson, Bertrand Russell and others.

Perhaps the most open and frank books Lessing has ever written. She writes about her love affairs, her depression at the ending of an important relationship and her experience of bringing up a child on her own.

Doris Lessing describes the genesis of her novel, The Golden Notebook - perhaps her greatest work, certainly her most popular - in great detail.