The Grass Is Singing

“There is passion here, a piercing accuracy, a rare sensitivity and power. . . . One can only marvel.”—New York Times Set in Southern Rhodesia under white rule, Doris Lessing´s first novel, now celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary, is at once a riveting chronicle of human disintegration, a searing portrait of the brutality of colonialism, a beautifully understated social critique, and a brilliant depiction of the quiet horror of one woman´s struggle against a ruthless fate. It´s now available as a special Harper Perennial Olive Edition. Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm works its slow poison. Mary´s despair progresses until the fateful arrival of Moses, an enigmatic black servant. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses—master and vassal—are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion, until their psychic tension explodes with devastating consequences.