«The Golden Notebook» by Doris Lessing

One of the most important books of the growing feminist movement of the 1950s, it was brought to a wider public by the Nobel Prize award to Doris Lessing in 2007. Authoress Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing a comprehensive ‘golden notebook’ which draws together the preoccupations of her life, each of which is examined in a different notebook: sources of her creative inspiration in a black book, communism in a red book, the breakdown of her marriage in a yellow book, and day to day emotions and dreams in a blue book. Anna’s struggle to unify the various strands of her life – emotional, political and professional – amasses into a fascinating encyclopaedia of female experience in the ‘50s. In this authentic, taboo breaking novel, Lessing brings the plight of women’s lives, from obscurity behind closed doors, into broad daylight. The Golden Notebook resonates with the concerns and experiences of a great many women and is a true modern classic, thoroughly deserving of its reputation as a feminist bible. A notoriously long and complex work, it is given a new life by this – its first unabridged recording.