In this ambitious novel of madness and release, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Doris Lessing imagines the fantastical "inner-space" life of an amnesiac.Charles Watkins, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, 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 pyschological 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 a harrowing voyage into the rarely glimpsed territory of the inner mind.
- ISBN10 0307390616
- ISBN13 9780307390615
- Publish Date 14 July 2009 (first published December 1973)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Random House USA Inc
- Imprint Random House Inc
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 320
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780307390615