The Summer Before the Dark (Vintage International) - Softcover

"A masterpiece. . . . Probably the best book she has written."
--The Economist

"A splendid and serious novel that reminds one once again of just how much the fictive imagination can order and enrich experience."
--The National Observer

"We are caught up in a rush of strong feeling. . . . Lessing's prose has the nervous intensity and quick, impressionistic lightness of some of D.H. Lawrence's later work."
--Newsweek

Nobel laureate Doris Lessing's classic novel of the pivotal summer in one woman's life is a brilliant excursion into the terrifying gulf between youth and old age.

As the summer begins, Kate Brown—attractive, intelligent, forty-five, happily married, with a house in the London suburbs and three grown children—has no reason to expect that anything will change. But by summer's end the woman she was—living behind a protective camouflage of feminine charm and caring—no longer exists. The Summer Before the Dark takes us along on Kate's journey: from London to Turkey to Spain, from husband to lover to madness, on the road to a frightening new independence and a confrontation with herself that lets her finally and truly come of age.