An incoherent man is found wandering the streets of London, at the start ofDoris Lessing’sbrilliant and disturbing novel about madness and release.”A brilliant, disturbing book…her most adventurous, imaginative experiment. She allows her didactic, satirical ideas about our civilization memorable expression.”-TLSLessing imagines the fantastical ‘inner-space’ life of an amnesiac, Charles Watkins. A Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, he has suffered a breakdown, confined to a mental hospital as his friends and doctors attempt to bring him back to reality. But Watkins has embarked on a tremendous psychological adventure that takes him from a spinning raft in the Atlantic to a ruined stone city on a tropical island to an outer-space journey through singing planets. As he travels in his mind through memory and the farther reaches of imagination, his doctors try to subdue him with ever more powerful drugs in a competition for his soul. In this provocative novel, Lessing takes us on aharrowing voyage into the rarely glimpsed territory of the inner mind..”Doris Lessing breaks through the semantic barrier into speculative areas of psychic geography like some returned traveller, drawing new, real maps. She is alert to more of the crucial questions than most of us and, by describing their contours so exactly, comes nearer to the slow progress towards a solution.”-The ObserverDoris Lessingis widely considered one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Among her most celebrated novels are The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark and Memoirs of a Survivor. Lessing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times: Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Sirian Experiments (1981) and The Good Terrorist (1985). She was also shortlisted, for her entire body of work, for The Man Booker International Prize 2