Martha Quest: A Novel (Children of Violence Book 1) - Kindle edition by Lessing, Doris. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

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Martha Quest: A Novel (Children of Violence Book 1) by [Doris Lessing]

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Martha Quest: A Novel (Children of Violence Book 1) Kindle Edition

by Doris Lessing (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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"I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do." — Barbara Kingsolver

Intelligent, sensitive, and fiercely passionate, Martha Quest is a young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood. She is a romantic idealistic in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the full with every nerve, emotion, and instinct laid bare to experience. For her, this is a time of solitary reading daydreams, dancing — and the first disturbing encounters with sex. The first of Doris Lessing's timeless Children of Violence novels, Martha Quest is an endearing masterpiece.

Print length

340 pages
Language

English
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HarperCollins e-books
Publication date

December 2, 2009
File size

506 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do." -- Barbara Kingsolver

"A formidable talent." -- C. P. Snow

"For sheer poise I don't think there has been a writer to touch her since Jane Austen." -- John Wain, Observer

"Stubborn, resilient, wry towards herself, Martha is Doris Lessing's most satisfying and complex characterization. She is a child of her times, of violence, who 'could no more dissociate herself from the violence done by her than a tadpole can live out of water." -- Times (London)

"There are many notable descriptions of adolescent boys and young men in our fiction. There are very few, in the same deep and radical sense, of young women. Mrs. Lessing's study of Martha Quest is one of them." -- New York Times Book Review --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing was one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of our time, the recipient of a host of international awards. She wrote more than thirty books—among them the novels Martha Quest, The Golden Notebook, and The Fifth Child. She died in 2013.

--This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B002ZJCQPG
Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins e-books (December 2, 2009)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 2, 2009
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 506 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 340 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #902,244 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,063 in Contemporary British Fiction
- #1,078 in Black & African American Literary Fiction
- #3,012 in British & Irish Literary Fiction

Customer Reviews:
43 ratings

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Doris Lessing
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Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In awarding the prize, the Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Elke Wetzig (elya) (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Customer reviews

5 star		52%
4 star		33%
3 star		6%
2 star		2%
1 star		7%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Lessing's Lessons Resonate

Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2018

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I've lately been re-reading all of Lessing's works, and am enjoying the experience enormously.

I first began reading her about 15 years ago, and I find that the older I get, the more prescient she seems (although that has little to do with this particular work), and I'm struck by her ruthless willingness to confront the highly uncomfortable facts of her own life, and her ability to create such fully formed characters that the reader attains such a level of intimacy with them that they seem wondrously alive, and events of 80 years ago seem immediate.

As a voracious reader, I seldom revisit authors once I have exhausted their oeuvre, but Lessing draws me back. If you've never read her, Martha Quest is a good place to start, and I challenge any reader to come away from Lessing unchanged.

One person found this helpful

Beautiful Writing

Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2015

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Doris Lessing writes so well that her prose is like music, and she has such a natural and easy grasp of the violent emotions that control and betray our better selves. "Martha Quest" is her semi-biographical depiction of a young and sensitive woman coming of age in a racist patriarchy -- just as her political conscious is about to be awaken she succumbs to the social pressures swirling around her and the personal anxieties that haunt from within her.

Compared with "The Grass is Singing," "Martha Quest" is a lesser work, but it is still worth a read if only for its rhapsodical prose.

One person found this helpful

Martha Quest by Doris Lessing

Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2009

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Martha Quest is the first novel in Doris Lessing's massive Children of Violence series, which cumulatively consists of five books and 2,100+ pages. Because of the breadth of the series as a whole, the first book here acts as a general introduction, and can be frustrating to read simply because it isn't a complete story in and of itself. We get to know Ms Quest, where she comes from and what she wants out of life, but little more. The heavily autobiographical protagonist leaves her childhood farm, moves into a busier city, lolls away at a job, goes to nighttime party after party, dates a few different men, gets caught up what an assorted group of friends, becomes more perceptive at the different social classes around her, and marries a somewhat mysterious man at the end. This is all in pretty general brushstrokes, and a reader may not find much interesting here, and Quest not a particularly appealing character. Trust me, stick with it and you will find Ms Quest to be as interesting and fully-formed as anyone you have ever met. This is a lukewarm gateway to an incredibly impressive series of novels.

2 people found this helpful

Introducing Martha Quest

Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2002

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We meet Martha Quest as a resentful 15 year old girl, growing up on a farm in Africa. As noted adequately here, this is the first book in her Children of Violence series-- held by many to be Lessings most important body of work (with the exception of _The Golden Notebook_).
I'm one of these Lessing fans from back in the day when _The Golden Notebook_ changed my life, and I haven't read much of her other work. I was impressed by Martha Quest-- it falls in the category of our classic coming-of-age novels, and as such stands well on its own as a novel. Lessing's Martha is at times so frustrating you want to shake her, but I think that's typical for the age of the character portrayed. Martha is all sharp edges-- she can't seem to fit with her parents, the men around her, the people with whom she tries to interact. With the blindness of her age, she's able to acutely feel how hard she has it, without really feeling the struggle of others around her who may have an even more difficult time. By turns infuriating and attractive, it can be painful to read Quest's story precisely because so it's so human as to be disturbingly familiar.
A should-read book.

27 people found this helpful

Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2014

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I grew up in a colonial African country and thought Doris Lessing captured the atmosphere of those times very well. I first read Martha Quest in the 1980s and remembered it as good. Now that I have read it again 30 years later I realise it is far better than good. Martha is a very real heroine - a young girl from a conservative racist background who inclines instinctively to a more liberal view yet lacks the knowledge and the sophistication to articulate this. Her youthful anger and frustration and rebellion against her roots is described beautifully as is the boorish juvenile racism of the young men at the sports club. My revisiting of this book taught me that while many of our faculties decline with age our ability to appreciate and understand literature just grows and grows.

4 people found this helpful

Disturbingly Real

Reviewed in the United States on May 23, 2018

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Martha Quest is looking for "Life"; I could not put this book down.
The description of Martha, her enormous preoccupation with herself, her feelings, hopes and dreams.
In the end she "follows the script" nevertheless.

moulding characters

Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2014

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Anyone who wants to see fully developed and moulded characters, and who can visualize society at the time in which the book is written, would love any of Doris Lessings' books. She slowly develops characters over a period of time and does so with such skill that it reveals far more than a photo would.

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2016

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One of Doris Lessing's easier books. It's a coming of age story somewhat reflecting her own youth. I thought I he ending kind of sudden but gave it 5 stars for her excellent writing quality.

Top reviews from other countries

S'Abba Druche

Re-reading

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 11, 2013

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I read the series of books of which this is the first one for the first time when I was 22 in the 1970s. I was completely captivated by them and went on to read many more books by Doris Lessing. Recently I started re-reading them, something I have never done with a book, because I remembered how important they were to me then. Interestingly this time I am not so emotionally involved with the story, perhaps because I am no longer around the same age as the protagonist Martha Quest. I 'see' much more in the writing though perhaps because I am more critically aware as a reader and also more mature as a person. I understand more of the psychological depth and can see that these books are the author's recounting of and reflecting upon her younger experience (although not an autobiography, there are certainly autobiographical similarities with her own life), her thinking, her emotions, her life choices. When I read Martha Quest the first time I would have given it 5 stars. Now I give it 4, perhaps because nowadays fiction has moved on and there are many more people writing in psychologically adept ways, with inventive structures and so forth and this book no longer stands out in such a stellar fashion as it did. Or maybe I am just older.

8 people found this helpful

Mrs P M Mitchell

A book to read and reread

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 28, 2014

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Here's a book I have read before, as all Doris Lessing's fiction. An early novel, dealing with an expatriate British family living in south Africa in genteel poverty, and a study in teenage angst. It tells of the rebellious feelings of Martha, and how she deals with her situation and her escape from the restrictions of her family's mores.
The first of a series of tales of Martha, and of South Africa and the Apartheid system, and the political situation there, it is a powerful depiction of the expatriate life.
I would recommend it to anybody interested in the history of Southern Africa, or in the study of families and their interaction, and attitudes to those around them

3 people found this helpful

denisec

Of its time

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 2, 2019

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Of its time.
Tedious.

yvonne hughes

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 13, 2017

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Doris Lessing is always a pleasure to read.

LILLY GRAHAM

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 29, 2014

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perfect

One person found this helpful

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