The Cleft

by Doris Lessing

In the last years of his life, a contemplative Roman senator embarks on one last epic endeavor: to retell the history of human creation and reveal the little-known story of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic coastal wilderness. The Clefts have neither need nor knowledge of men; childbirth is controlled through the cycles of the moon, and they bear only female children. But with the unheralded birth of a strange new child—a boy—the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy.

(From Publisher).

Doris Lessing was born in 1919. The Grass Is Singing, her first novel, was published in 1950, and she has since gone on to publish more than fifty books. Named a Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature in Great Britain, she has been awarded the David Cohen British Literature Prize, Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalonia Prize, and the S. T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in North London.