Alfred and Emily: Doris Lessing's Masterful Blend of Fiction and Family History

Alfred and Emily is an intimate and revealing book by Doris Lessing, the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature and author of The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, that explores the lives of her parents, each irrevocably damaged by the Great War. After beginning with a novella that portrays the happier life her parents would have led had there been no war, Lessing proceeds to tell the story of their marriage as it actually was in this €œintriguing work . . . [that] shimmers with precisely remembered details.€ (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)