Anna Wulf is a young novelist with writer's block. Divorced, with a young child, and disillusioned by unsatisfactory relationships, she feels her life is falling apart. In fear of madness, she records her experiences in four coloured notebooks. The black notebook addresses her problems as a writer; the red her political life; the yellow her relationships and emotions; and the blue becomes a diary of everyday events. But it is the fifth notebook � the Golden Notebook � which is the key to her recovery and renaissance.

Bold and illuminating, fusing sex, politics, madness and motherhood, The Golden Notebook is at once a wry and perceptive portrait of the intellectual and moral climate of the 1950s � a society on the brink of feminism � and a powerful and revealing account of a woman searching for her own personal and political identity.

Doris Lessing was the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature and is one of the most important writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950, and since then her international reputation has flourished. Among her other celebrated novels are The Golden Notebook, The Summer Before the Dark and The Good Terrorist. Her most recent works include two volumes of autobiography, Under my Skin and Walking in the Shade, and the novel The Cleft