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Children of Violence Series

This epic series chronicles the journey of a young woman grappling with societal expectations and personal awakening during the tumultuous mid-20th century. Set against the backdrop of colonial Africa and later London, the protagonist navigates complex personal and political landscapes. The narrative delves into themes of identity, independence, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. It offers a profound exploration of female consciousness, intellectual rebellion, and the quest for authentic self-expression amidst historical upheaval.

The Four-Gated City
Martha Quest
Landlocked
A Ripple from the Storm
A Proper Marriage

Recommended Reading Order

  1. 1

    Martha Quest

    3.8(2182)Add rating

    Intelligent, sensitive, and fiercely passionate, Martha Quest is a young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood. She is a romantic idealistic in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion, and instinct laid bare to experience. For her, this is a time of solitary reading daydreams, dancing -- and the first disturbing encounters with sex. The first of Doris Lessing's timeless Children of Violence novels, Martha Quest is an endearing masterpiece.

    Martha Quest
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  2. 2

    A Proper Marriage

    4.1(965)Add rating

    An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a failing marriage. Finally, she must make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security. A Proper Marriage is the second novel in Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece on its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

    A Proper Marriage
  3. 3

    A Ripple from the Storm

    • 288 pages
    • 11 hours of reading
    3.9(12)Add rating

    The third book in the Children of Violence series, a quintet of novels tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa through to old age in a post-nuclear Britain. The other books are Martha Quest , A Proper Marriage , Landlocked and The Four-Gated City .

    A Ripple from the Storm
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  4. 4
  5. 5

    The Four-Gated City

    4.0(17)Add rating

    The fifth and final book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner's 'Children of Violence' series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain. 'The Four-Gated City' finds Martha Quest in 1950s London and very much part of the social history of the time: the Cold War, the anti-nuclear Aldermaston Marches, Swinging London, the deepening of poverty and social anarchy. Daring to go a step further - as Lessing so often has in her career - the novel ends with the century in the throes of World War Three. In the four previous novels of the 'Children of Violence' series, Lessing explored the end of an epoch. Here she trains her gaze on the present - and the future. The disquieting power of her vision revealed across this series finds its culmination in this brave and visionary work.

    The Four-Gated City