By turns, an unsparing and joyous account of life in a postwar London rooming house by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007.

In the early post-war years, Doris Lessing left her native Southern Africa in search of a grail - a life of glamour and refinement that she naively believed England offered everyone. A fascinating, hilarious memoir of her first impressions of her adopted country, `In Pursuit of the English' brilliantly captures Lessing's constant wonder at and growing affection for the people she came to know: the working-class of the East End of London. Lusty, quarrelsome, unscrupulous and full-blooded, they were quite unlike the English she had expected to find ...