Mara and Dann: An Adventure

Doris Lessing

Flamingo, 1999 - Africa - 407 pages

The new novel from one of the greatest twentieth-century writers. Doris Lessing returns to the world of visionary fiction, last visited in her acclaimed 'Canopus in Argos' quintet of novels in the 1980s. It is sooner than you might think. And the earth's climate is much changed -- it's colder than ever before in the north, and unbearably dry and hot in the south. Mara, who is seven, and her four-year-old brother Dann find themselves somewhere very strange, not home... They are taken in by a kindly, grandmotherly woman, but this new life is hard: hunger, dirt, thirst and danger are the children's constant companions. Drought and fire carry off their adoptive home and force them to set off northward into the unknown, to experience a series of adventures that bring them through to an altogether altered world, where they can start to learn and build anew. Doris Lessing has written a compelling, troubling and entertaining novel that, through the remarkable odyssey of a brother and sister living in the imagined future, manages to tell us a great deal about the present we only dimly perceive and scarcely know how to value.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - burritapal - LibraryThing

I loved this story about a brother and sister, last of a royal family, travelling the length of Ifrik. This is an Africa that is thousands of years in the future, when another ice age is retreating ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - TheAmpersand - LibraryThing

Dystopias seem to be very much in fashion these days, so it's quite possible that other authors have covered the sort of themes dealt with in "Mara and Dann," and it's even possible that they've done ...

About the author

Doris Lessing is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her first novel, 'The Grass is Singing', was published in 1950. Among her other celebrated novels are 'The Golden Notebook', 'The Fifth Child' and 'Memoirs of a Survivor'. She has also published two volumes of her autobiography, 'Under my Skin' and 'Walking in the Shade'. Doris Lessing died on 17 November 2013 at the age of 94.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Mara and Dann: An Adventure
• Author: Doris Lessing
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Flamingo, 1999
• ISBN: 0006550835, 9780006550839
• Length: 407 pages