Retreat to Innocence [inscribed]

Inscribed second impression of a novel almost never found signed because it was repudiated on political grounds by its Nobel Prize winning author. In dark ink on the first free endpaper is written: 'X/ To the Youth/ Doris Lessing'. Who is the youth and what was his relationship with Lessing? Answers came there none. The book is near fine in black cloth, a second impression from two months after the first. The jacket is not price-clipped, bright with just a little rubbing to top and tail of the spine and browning to the lower printed panel. Set in austere post-war London this novel, a much better effort is claimed by its detractors, tells the story of an affair between Julia and a Czech emigre communist, Jan Brod. Lessing later rejected the novel and refused to have it reprinted because she had chosen to end the novel with Brod's loyal return to communist Eastern Europe which she came to judge as the wrong call in the light of the invasion of Hungary and her own disenchantment with Marxism.