'Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind'

Mara and Dann

Mara and Dann

Doris Lessing

A visionary novel from Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

It is sooner than you might think. And the Earth’s climate is much changed – it’s colder than ever before in the north, and unbearably dry and hot in the south. Mara, who is seven, and her four-year-old brother Dann find themselves somewhere very strange, not home …

They are taken in by a kindly, grandmotherly woman, but this new life is hard: hunger, dirt, thirst and danger are the children’s constant companions. Drought and fire carry off their adoptive home and force them to set off northward into the unknown, to experience a series of adventures that bring them to an altogether altered world, where they can start to learn and build anew.

Doris Lessing has written a compelling, troubling and entertaining novel that, through the remarkable odyssey of a brother and sister living in the imagined future, manages to tell us a great deal about the present we perceive only dimly and scarcely know how to value.

Reviews of Mara and Dann

    • ‘I hope everyone reads Mara and Dann and it wins all the prizes.’ Victoria Glendinning, Literary Review
    • ‘An outstanding piece of storytelling… rich and imaginative.’Helen Dunmore, Daily Mail
    • ‘Fascinating and profoundly curious.’ Rachel Cusk, Daily Express

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