I would recommend this book for book groups because there is so much to discuss, especially if you read it through a post-colonial lens (which you know I like to do).

He may as well have brought her to Mars, and the changes her new, alien environment wreaks upon her have devastating consequences. Unfortunately, that man is a not-very-successful farmer who brings Mary from her urban life to live in a hovel in the bush. Thus, when she hears her more conventional colleagues gossiping about her not being married, Mary falls prey to society’s expectations of her and she marries the first available man that comes along. Warp-speed plot summary: Mary Turner, young, white, and naive, has actually stepped out of the 1940’s constrictions on her gender, but doesn’t realize that her happiness is unusual.

Lessing brings the reader inside the psychological breakdown of Mary Turner, an experience so real and painful–yet utterly compelling–that it leaves you both fascinated and exhausted. Now you spend the rest of the book watching how and why it happened.Īlthough at times I felt like Lessing could have used an editor to help her with her sentences (I can’t believe I am saying that about a Nobel laureate!) and I wondered if her later works improved with the author’s experience and maturity, I was mesmerized by this book. From the first few pages you know that Mary Turner has been murdered and that Moses the houseboy has confessed to the deed. Reading The Grass is Singing is kind of like watching a train wreck about to happen. (It’s summer, so I love to read books set in far away, usually hot places.)

The book jacket said it takes place in “a sleepy South African town,” and that was enough for me I was sold. So, while browsing the “L” shelf at the library, I came upon her first novel, The Grass is Singing, written in 1950. I always wanted to read Doris Lessing’s work, but The Golden Notebook intimidated me by its girth.

The grass is singing characters