The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches

Doris Lessing has a powerful voice and a particular one. It speaks in anger at the distortion of personal relations ion a unsound society, but speaks it with a wit that manages to be both pitiless and compassionate. – Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

The stories and sketches in this collection penetrate to the heart of human experience with the passion and intelligence readers have come to expect of Doris Lessing. Most of the pieces are set in contemporary London, a city the author loves for its variety, its diversity, the way it connects the life of animals and birds in the parks to the streets. Lessing’s fiction also explores the darker corners of relationships between women and men, as in the rich and emotionally complex title story, in which she uncovers a more parlous reality behind the facade of the most conventional relationship between the sexes.