Name: The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog
ISBN: 9780007397266

Doris Lessing

A fascinating novel of love and ecology from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Doris Lessing returns to the world of visionary fiction, first visited in her Canopus in Argos quintet of novels in the 1980s, and in ‘Mara and Dann’, to which this is a sequel, in 1999.

The Earth’s climate has changed – it is colder than ever before – and Dann, four in the first book, is now grown up and a general, and the man to whom everyone looks for guidance and leadership.

Lessing’s novel charts his adventures across the frozen wastes of the north, a journey that will eventually lead to the discovery of a secret library.

Reviews of The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

- ‘This is an unsettling but compelling novel – like a nihilistic version of “The Lord of the Rings” with a deeply flawed, Shakespearean tragic hero at its centre.’ Financial Times
- ‘Lessing pierces the heart with the half quotations that Dann’s scribes scribble down as the books fall to dust in their hands…Lessing has much wisdom to impart although she is astute enough not to preach but to pose some unsettling questions.’ Maggie Gee, Sunday Times
- ‘It is so well done, written with such zest, imagination, sympathy and intelligence, that my prejudice against the sort of novel it is was soon disarmed…a piece of compelling narrative, wonderfully imagined.’ Alan Massie, Spectator
- ‘Lessing engages the reader constantly…the plot is complicated, deliciously so…full of unobtrusive wisdom, the book is restless with curiosity and shrewd in its reading of human nature.’ Scotsman
- ‘Lessing’s new novel is as unsettling as anything she has ever written.’ Independent
- ‘This visionary novel from one of the distinguished writers of the past 60 years is, fundamentally, an impassioned warning: dystopia could be the future.’ Daily Mail