Book cover of Martha Quest

Book description

The first book in the "Children of Violence" series, a quintet of novels tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa through to old age in a post-nuclear Britain. The other novels are "A Proper Marriage", "A Ripple from the Storm", "Landlocked" and "The Four-Gated City".

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Why read it?

1 author picked Martha Quest as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book, which was published in 1952, is about a young white woman living in what was then the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). I loved the way in which it captured the rather trapped feelings of a very young woman eager to escape the constraints of what she was experiencing as a highly restricted and narrow life. I always looked at Doris Lessing’s writings in a rather personal way because her daughter, Jean Wisdom, was in my class at school in Cape Town. Although we knew that her mother was a writer of some note, we had…

From Selina's list on white Africans.

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These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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