Alfred and Emily

'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.' The first book after Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa: 'Here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.' With the publication of 'Alfred and Emily' she has done just that.