The first volume of the autobiography of Doris Lessing, author of 'The Grass is Singing' and 'The Golden Notebook', and Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Winner of the James Tait Black Prize 1994. Doris Lessing's autobiography begins with her childhood in Africa and ends on her arrival in London in 1949 with the typescript of her first novel in her suitcase. It charts the evolution first of her consciousness, then of her sexuality and finally of her political awareness with an almost overwhelming immediacy, and is as distinctive and challenging as anything she has ever written. It is already recognised as one of the great autobiographies of the twentieth century.