The Children of Violence series, a quintet of novels tracing the life of Martha Quest, from her childhood in Africa to a post-nuclear Britain of AD 2000, first established Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, as a great radical writer.
In this, the fifth and final volume, Marth, now middle-aged, leaves Africa for post-war London. As housekeeper to the Coldridge family, she watches the children in her care, the new 'children of violence', grow up in a disintegrating world, a world careering toward nuclear disaster.
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.