Alfred & Emily
By Doris Lessing
Fourth Estate £16.99 288 pages
FT bookshop price: £13.59

As a young woman, Doris Lessing left her parents behind in Rhodesia – with the result that they never left her. Melanie Klein believed that we turn our mother into both good and bad “internal objects”. Lessing, as a novelist and an autobiographer, has been struggling to make a bearable image of her mother, and to exorcise an unbearable one, ever since. The first world war, she tells us in an introduction, “did them both in”. Her father lost a leg in the trenches. Her mother lost her great love, a doctor, drowned in the Channel. “That war, the Great War, the war that would end all war, squatted over my childhood,” she writes, bluntly.