The Sweetest Dream

Second Hand

Excellent Condition

It's the morning of the Sixties and it's suppertime at Freedom Hall, the most welcoming household in North London.

Frances Lennox stands at her stove, bringing another feast to readiness before ladling it out to the motley, youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table - here are her two sons, smarting at their upbringing but beginning to absorb their mother's lessons. 

Over there in the corner is Frances' ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, who delivers his rousing tirades, then laps up the adolescent adulation while he laps up his soup, before disappearing into the night to evade the clutches of his responsibilities.

Upstairs sits Johnny's exiled mother, funding all, but finding she can embrace only one lost little girl - Sylvia, who has to travel to Africa, to freshly, fervently independent Zimlia, to find out who she is and what she wants.

These are the people dreaming the Sixties into being and the people who on the morning after all that dreaming, woke to find they were the ones taxed with clearing up and making good.

No living novelist in Britain is in a better position than Doris Lessing to look hard and long at what the world did in that eventful decade and at the world that decade made.