This is the first volume of Doris Lessing's Collected African Stories. A classic work of twentieth-century literature. 'In story after story, Doris Lessing portrays the helpless collisions and alienations of the races. One brings away a sense of the sheer human impossibility of South Africa, as a place fit only for habitation by the imagination of exiles and of children. All else seems lost, betrayed and spoiled, except the glare of the sun, the dust, the boulders.