This book includes every story written by Doris Lessing about Africa: all of her first collection, This Was the Old Chief's Country (unavailable in America); the four tales about Africa from Five (also unavailable); the African stories from The Habit of Loving and A Man and Two Women and four stories never before collected.This, then, is Doris Lessing's Africa - where she lived for twenty-five years and where so much of her interest and concern still resides. Here, as she sees them, are the complexities, the agonies and joys, the textures of African life and society.The collection, bridging as it does Mrs. Lessing's entire writing career, contains much of her most extraordinary work. Beyond that, it is a brilliant portrait of a world that is vital to all of us, shadowy to most of us - perceived by an artist of the first rank writing with passion and honesty about her native land.It is a central book in the work of one of the most important of today's writers.