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Fiction » Best Books by Nobel Prize in Literature Winners

The Summer Before the Dark by Doris Lessing
Buy now

The Summer Before the Dark

by Doris Lessing

Recommendations from our site

“Around the time when the idea of the midlife crisis was being popularised in the 70s, there was a spate of novelistic representations of midlife crises. The Summer Before the Dark is emblematic and symptomatic; it’s a canonical depiction of the stereotypical female midlife crisis of the 1970s. It’s about a forty-five year old woman who has grown-up children and whose husband is going away for work for six months. She is at a loss with what to do with herself, but she happens to be fluent in several languages and gets hired by a global foods company. She goes off to Istanbul and begins a series of adventures about which she’s very conflicted and ambivalent.” Read more...

The best books on Midlife Crisis

Kieran Setiya

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