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Book Cover
Book
Author Lessing, Doris, 1919-2013.

Title The sweetest dream / Doris Lessing
Edition First edition
Published New York : HarperCollins Publishers, [2002]
©2002

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 W'BOOL  820.914 L63925 A6/Sw  AVAILABLE
Description 478 pages ; 25 cm
regular print
Summary "This story of a family, spanning most of the twentieth century, has its fulcrum in the Sixties, that contradictory and embattled decade about which argument becomes louder each day. The youth of that time, bursting old bonds and demanding freedoms, were seen by some of their elders in a manner not at all as they saw themselves, as romantic idealists, but as deeply damaged people. Old Julia, the clan's matriarch, knows why. "You can't have two dreadful wars and then say 'That's it, and now everything will go back to normal.' They're screwed up, our children, they are the children of war.""
"Remarkable women, Julia and Frances, grandmother and mother, fight for "the kids" against obstacles, the worst being Comrade Johnny. Here is a memorable picture of a character only recently departed from our scene. "The revolution comes before personal matters" is his dictum, as he deposits discarded wives and hurt children in the accommodating house whose emotional center is always the extendable kitchen table, that essential prop of the Sixties, around which the family sits through the evenings, eating, joking, boasting about their shoplifting, debating the violent ideologies of the time that take some of them out to the Third World, another to a South African village dying of AIDS."--BOOK JACKET
Subject Mothers and daughters -- Fiction.
British -- South Africa -- Fiction.
SUBJECT London (England) -- Fiction. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2008106611
South Africa -- Fiction. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2008111620
Genre/Form Domestic fiction.
LC no. 2002279950
ISBN 0066213347 alkaline paper