In this extraordinary book, Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both fictional and factual. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, causing the loss of his 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, Doris Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war at all.
This is followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came to be in the shadow of that war and their move to Rhodesia.
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