In Pursuit of the English

<p><strong>One of the most authentic books ever written about the English....Funny touching and so real that the smell and taste of London seem to rise from its pages. -- <em>San Francisco Chronicle</em></strong></p><p><em>In Pursuit of the English</em> is a novelist's account of a lusty quarrelsome unscrupulous funny pathetic full-blooded life in a working-class rooming house. It is a shrewd and unsentimental picture of Londoners you've probably never met or even read about--though they are the <em>real</em> English. The cast of characters -- if that term can be applied to real people -- includes: Bobby Brent a con man; Mrs. Skeffington a genteel woman who bullies her small child and flings herself down two flights of stairs to avoid having another; and Miss Priest a prostitute who replies to Lessing's question Don't you ever like sex? with If you're going to talk dirty I'm not interested.</p><p>In swift barbed style in high hard farcical writing that is eruptively funny Doris Lessing records the joys and terrors of everyday life. The truth of her perception shines through the pages of a work that is a brilliant piece of cultural interpretation an intriguing memoir and a thoroughly engaging read.</p>