Mara and Dann: An Adventure

Format:	Paperback 416 pages

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Synopsis

A visionary novel from Doris Lessing, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. 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.

Book details

Published
03/04/2000

Publisher
Flamingo

ISBN
9780006550839

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Jacket review

'I hope everyone reads Mara and Dann and it wins all the prizes.' Victoria Glendinning, Literary Review 'An outstanding piece of storytelling... rich and imaginative' Helen Dunmore, Daily Mail 'Fascinating and profoundly curious' Rachel Cusk, Daily Express

UK Kirkus review

Lessing is a wise woman, a prophet - one of those rare human beings who see beyond their own place and time. Mara and Dann may be her greatest book. It retells a very old story, about a brother and sister who are parted and reunited again and again as they travel towards the cold and at last return to summer. It haunts our imagination because it reflects human history during recurrent ice ages. Lessing makes her story like a river, letting it wind on and on in a deceptively simple style that recalls the oral storytelling to which, in her book, the people of 'Ifrik', or Africa, have long ago returned. As Mara and Dann, travelling always north through Ifrik towards the hope of water, slowly find out, they are living 20,000 years after ice has covered the northern hemisphere. South of the ice mountains of 'Yirrup', life means survival - fighting off starving people, giant insects and scorpions. Death is nothing, books a confused memory, love something warned against in half-remembered stories - Mam Bova (Madame Bovary), Anna Kren (Anna Karenina). But Mara and Dann love each other above all things, a love that is tested by betrayal and by a final, climactic sexual tempting. Lessing's extraordinary vision makes the mind spin and the heart ache for the littleness of our 'cities... temporary as dreams. Like people...' Review by MAGGIE GEE Editor's note: Maggie Gee is the author of The Ice People. (Kirkus UK)