The Four-Gated City

The fifth and final book in the Nobel Prize for Literature winner’s ‘Children of Violence’ series tracing the life of Martha Quest from her childhood in colonial Africa to old age in post-nuclear Britain.‘The Four-Gated City’ finds Martha Quest in 1950s London and very much part of the social history of the time: the Cold War, the anti-nuclear Aldermaston Marches, Swinging London, the deepening of poverty and social anarchy. Daring to go a step further – as Lessing so often has in her career – the novel ends with the century in the throes of World War Three.In the four previous novels of the ‘Children of Violence’ series, Lessing explored the end of an epoch. Here she tra…