She only seesВ her husband at breakfast and supper (he spends the intervening hours out in the field running the farm)В and she struggles to cope with managing the houseboy, whom she abuses and treats with disdain: This is a shock to MaryвЂ™s system, a town girl used to leading a busy work and social life, who must now spend a lot of time alone, in the bush, where the heat is unbearable and her living conditions impoverished. Her husband, Dick Turner, is a struggling farmer, who whisks her away to the bush, where she is expected to live a life of rural isolation in a shabby вЂњshackвЂќ, running the household and managing the black servant who cooks and cleans for the couple. But then, with the clock ticking, sheВ succumbed to social convention and got married, despite the fact sheВ hadВ never felt the need to have a partner and was frightened of sex (in todayвЂ™s parlance we would probably describe her as вЂњasexualвЂќ).

The woman - Mary - was once bright, young and independent,В living a relatively carefree life in the city. But then the narrativeВ takes an interesting twist and what starts off as a murder mystery becomesВ the story ofВ how the woman came to live in the area several decades earlier. The first (shocking) chapter charts what happens immediately following the discovery of the body - a muddled confusion of white colonial types acting as judge, jury and executioner. It is thought he was in search of valuables. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning. This astonishingly confident book opens in unconventional, some might say brash, style, in the form of a newspaper story by a вЂњspecial correspondentвЂќ: ItВ brims with tension and shimmers with insight into race relations, colonialism, marriage and rural life in what was then Southern Rhodesia. The Grass is Singing, originally published in 1950, was Nobel Prize-winning author Doris LessingвЂs debut novel. Fiction вЂ“ Kindle edition Fourth Estate 208 pages 2013.

Doris lessing the grass is singing