I read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way, and it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do. — Barbara Kingsolver

The Children of Violence series, a quintet of novels tracing the life of Martha Quest, from her childhood in Africa to a post-nuclear Britain of AD 2000, first established Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, as a great radical writer.

In this, the fifth and final volume, Marth, now middle-aged, leaves Africa for post-war London. As housekeeper to the Coldridge family, she watches the children in her care, the new 'children of violence’, grow up in a disintegrating world, a world careering toward nuclear disaster.