"The Golden Notebook is Doris Lessing's most important work and has left its mark upon the ideas and feelings of a whole generation of women." — New York Times Book Review

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism.

At first, Jean Suttman thought she had died and gone to Heaven when she was granted the opportunity to study in Rome. But the body that's lying in the ancient subterranean Temple of Mithra—the murdered corpse of a repulsive and disliked fellow student—isn't her idea of heavenly. Now she is truly frightened, not just because small "accidents" seem to be occurring around her with disturbing regularity. It's the ever-increasing certainty