As the summer begins, Kate Brown -- attractive, intelligent, forty five, happily enough married, with a house in the London suburbs and three grown children -- has no reason to expect anything will change. But when the summer ends, the woman she was -- living behind a protective camouflage of feminine charm and caring -- no longer exists. This novel. Doris Lessing's brilliant excursion into the terrifying stretch of time between youth and old age, is her 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 self that lets her, finally, come truly of age.

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

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

"(A) masterpiece...probably the best book she has written." — —