The first book after Doris' Nobel Prize takes her back to her childhood in Southern Africa and the lives, both fictional and factual, that her parents lead. 'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.' In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In the first half of this book, Doris Lessing imagines the lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war at all, a story that has them meeting at a village cricket match outside Colchester as children but leading separate lives. This is followed by a piercing examination of their lives as they actually came to be in the shadow of that war, their move to Rhodesia, a damaged couple squatting over Doris's childhood in a strange land. 'Here I still am,' says Doris Lessing, 'trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free.' With the publication of Alfred and Emily she has done just that.

多丽丝•莱辛（1919- ）

英国著名作家，2007年诺贝尔文学奖得主。囊括毛姆文学奖、英国皇家文学会荣誉奖等几十项文学大奖，被誉为继弗吉尼亚•伍尔夫之后英国最伟大的女作家。

1950年凭借处女作《野草在歌唱》步入文坛。1973年出版的《天黑前的夏天》被《纽约时报》誉为“继马尔克斯的《百年孤独》之后最好的小说”。次年面世的《幸存者回忆录》以富于哲人气质的深邃和诗人的想象探讨了人类文明的前途。年近九旬，莱辛以特别的方式回顾父母的人生，写下了这本《我的父亲母亲》。