The Swedish Academy called it one of a 'handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship'. Framed by a third-person story of a writer, Anna Wulf, and her friend Molly, the novel weaves together four of Anna's notebooks which mirror the different strands of her life – Africa, the Communist Party, a doomed love affair and her journal – to arrive at a fifth, The Golden Notebook, which binds them all together.

This account of the fractured lives of British women after the war has been hailed as a feminist masterpiece. Gradually she begins to develop a relationship with one of their black servants, Moses – a relationship the reader knows will end in tragedy from the first page. When Mary Turner's husband becomes sick she takes over the running of their failing Rhodesian farm.

Lessing arrived in London in the spring of 1949 with £20 and the manuscript of a novel drawing heavily on her life in Africa, exploring the power and fear at the heart of the colonial experience.

Doris lessing the grass is singing