Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, and I’d never heard of her so I borrowed some random books of hers from the library. The Grass Is Singing is a terribly sad and tense little book about people trapped in their roles — both exploiter and exploited as master/servant, husband/wife, rich/poor, man/woman. The book is skillfully balanced in gray areas — no character comes out as virtuous or as really evil, just struggling as best they can with the circumstances they were given (though at times I think it gets a little too close to the hopeless victims of fate end of things).

It’s roughly autobiographical too — it reads as kind of “what would have happened to me if I didn’t become an independent writer.”