The Summer Before the Dark By Doris Lessing

Hardcover, May 1973. Book Club. Hardcover. Good/Good. BCE/BOMC - Dust jacket is clean. Foxing on page edges. No writing or marks observed in the text. Binding is tight and square. Rough-cut front edge. . . . . . . . . . . . . A real tour-de-force that release all the pain of someone who has forgotten who they are because they have had to change, unconsciously, to suit others. Tops to Doris Lessing, creation of a struggle in which the protagonist continually questions herself and her life. At first the story is smooth and floats from job to family, work to Italy. A relationship and an extended stay leaves Kate Brown wondering and dreaming of seals. In this dream she must find water, but all around her is ice and darkness. She has been someone who comforts and in return for her dutiful helpings she is noticed and appreciated, but once she loosens her scrunched hair, graying and losing the dye, she realizes that she is invisible to the world. A shift takes place as Kate contracts an illness; she lies in a hotel and then when is cared-for for several weeks, she gets used to it. After leaving the hotel she rents a room in a house belonging to a girl of youth. Conflict! Changes and thoughts burst from the pages, and one sees, so she says, humans as animals or humans with animal masks on. She decides to go home to take care of her returning children, than stays and mothers her roommate. The end when Kate leaves to go home, and we understand that one must be themselves imagined or real -- K.N.R. Family-owned bookshop in Steubenville, Ohio: BookMarx Bookstore. Books shipped within 24 hours.