MARTHA QUEST

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 fullest 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. Martha Quest is the first novel in Doris Lessing’s classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece in its own right and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.