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Alfred and Emily

by (Fourth Estate)

(69 reviews)

£5.99

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Description

Doris Lessing's first book after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature revisits her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents led.

'I think my father''s rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.'

In this extraordinary book, Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital.

In the first half of this book, Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket match as children but leading separate lives. This is followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came to be in the shadow of that war, their move to Rhodesia, a damaged couple hulking over Lessing's childhood in a strange land.

'Here I still am,' says Doris Lessing, 'trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.'

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Price Summary

  • We started tracking this book on November 17, 2013.
  • This book was £4.99 when we started tracking it.
  • The price of this book has changed 66 times in the past 3,784 days.
  • The current price of this book is £5.99 last checked one day ago.
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  • This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is £4.99.
  • The lowest price to date was £1.99 last reached on August 16, 2017.
  • This book has been £1.99 one time since we started tracking it.
  • The highest price to date was £7.49 last reached on March 6, 2019.
  • This book has been £7.49 2 times since we started tracking it.

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Additional Info

  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • Lending: Disabled
  • Print Length: 290 Pages
  • File Size: 1,779 KB

We last verified the price of this book about one day ago. At that time, the price was £5.99. This price is subject to change. The price displayed on the Amazon.co.uk website at the time of purchase is the price you will pay for this book. Please confirm the price before making any purchases.