The Summer Before the Dark
With her husband abroad and her grown children scattered for the summer, a London housewife of forty-five takes a job interpreting at a food conference and discovers she is good at it. Travel, an affair with a younger man and a long illness strip away the appearance she has maintained for twenty years, while a dream of carrying a stranded seal towards the sea returns each night. Lessing's study of the invisibility that arrives with middle age.
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