Lessing, Doris: 1919 - 2013
Mara and Dann, 1999 - Information about the Book
- General Information
- A story of an orphaned brother and sister wandering northwards through Africa in search of water during a new ice age, 25,000 years hence. Lessing's post-tech world is utterly strange, detailed and absorbing as a long bright dream.
- Information from Doris Lessing's Homepage. "Through the remarkable odyssey of a brother and sister living in the imagined future, Lessing manages to tell us a great deal about the present."
- Facts
- Doris Lessing said at a chat at BarnesAndNoble, January 20, 1999, about THE FIFTH CHILD:
And now MARA AND DANN is being liked by adolescents. Sometimes toward the middle of writing it, I thought, My goodness, kids will like this, and in experimental tests, we tried the book out on young folks and they do indeed like it. This pleases me very much. I have gotten many letters over the years from librarians and teachers, and my reply is always the same -- that the things I have written that kids like were never written deliberately for children. Three of my short stories have been particularly liked by children. One is "Flight," another "Through the Tunnel," and also "The Story of Two Dogs." I didn't write them specifically for children, though. It gives me so much pleasure that young people like MARA AND DANN.
- Doris Lessing said at a chat at BarnesAndNoble, January 20, 1999, about THE FIFTH CHILD:
- Articles
- Review. "'Mara and Dann' suggests that Lessing can sometimes be oblivious of her greatest strength as a writer: her ability to dissect the vacillations and delusions of 20th-century people living in a 20th-century world." New York Times; January 10, 1999
- Tomorrow never knows. "It is a perverse chemistry typical of Lessing at her exasperating best." Jonathan Keates reviews Mara and Dann. April 5, 1999
- Analysis. "Climate change is not just loss of biodiversity, loss of life forms, but it is the loss of human knowledge." Dr. Bellarsi;, Université Libre de Bruxelles