The Sun Between Their Feet

<p>The second volume of Doris Lessing’s ‘Collected African Stories’ and a classic work from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.</p> <p>‘As for these stories – when I write one it is as if I open a gate into a landscape which is always there. Time has nothing to do with it. A certain kind of pulse starts beating and I recognise it: it is time I wrote another story from that landscape external and internal at the same time which was once the Old Chief’s Country.’ Doris Lessing from the Preface</p> <p>This much-acclaimed collection of stories vividly evokes both the grandeur of Africa and the glare of its sun and the wide open space as well as the great irresolvable tensions between whites and blacks. Tales of poor white farmers and their lonely wives of storm air thick with locusts of ants and pomegranate trees black servants and the year of hunger in a native village – all combine to present a powerful image of a continent which seems incorruptible in spite of all the people who plough mine and plunder it to make their living. In Doris Lessing’s own words ‘Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature among other creatures in a large landscape.’</p>