Under My Skin Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949

'Passionate and compelling, a book so packed with extraordinary images that it has obliterated almost everything else I read in 1994.' Rose Tremain

'In this immediate, vivid, beautifully paced memoir, Doris Lessing sets the individual against history, the personal against the general and shows, by the example of her life set down honestly, how biography and fiction mesh, how fiction transmutes the personal to the general, how the particular experience illuminates the universe. By putting her life on the page, she has created her greatest work of art.' Hilary Mantel, LRB

'The book pulsates with life. The intensity of the sensory world is brilliantly evoked ... Not just the story of the first thirty years of one life, this is the biography also of an age.' Jane Dunn, Observer