Writer Doris Lessing on Growing Up in Africa

Book critic John Leonard reviews "African Laughter," Lessing's memoir of the four times she visited the country of her birth--now called Zimbabwe--and her impressions of its changing social and political climate.

Writer Doris Lessing. Since her first novel, The Grass is Singing, published in 1950, she has written many books and plays, including the Children of Violence series, The Golden Notebook, and more recently Shikasta and her "space-fiction" series. Her new novel is titled The Fifth Child. Fresh Air book critic John Leonard once described Mrs. Lessing as "one of the half-dozen most interesting minds to have chosen to write fiction in English in this century."

Before she became a novelist, Ramona Emerson spent 16 years documenting crime scenes. Shutter tells the story of a forensic photographer named Rita who, like Emerson, is a member of the Navajo Nation.