Discover our May Book of the Month: The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing

Join us as we revisit this revolutionary satire by the three-time Booker shortlisted author. Plus: explore our reading guide, read an extract and enter our exclusive competition

A.S. Byatt called her ‘one of the few prophets of literature’. Throughout an extraordinary career which spanned around 70 works, her fiction defied convention, covering themes ranging across feminism, social justice and sci-fi. We couldn’t be talking about anyone but Doris Lessing - a writer who, in her own words, ‘couldn't not write’.

Lessing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Additionally, she was shortlisted, for her entire body of work, for the Man Booker International Prize in both 2005 and 2007. In 2007, she was also awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - at the time she was only the 11th female winner in the award’s history.

This month, we’re shining a spotlight on Lessing’s third Booker-shortlisted book, 1985’s The Good Terrorist. It’s a contemporary satire that pits radical ideology against a bourgeois upbringing and explores the contradictions and self-delusion at the heart of political idealism.

Set in contemporary 1980s London, a loose-knit group of political vagabonds form an ill-defined and volatile underground. Drifting from one cause to the next, they occupy abandoned houses, demonstrate and picket, devise strategies to fit situations that may or may not arise. But, within this world, one small group of men and women – whose deepest conviction seems to rest in a sense of their own largely untested radicalism – is moving inexorably toward active terrorism.

Writing for The Guardian, the novelist Jane Rogers called The Good Terrorist ‘a witty and furious book, angry at human stupidity and destructiveness, both within the system and without’. Kirkus Reviews described it as ‘a psychological portrait that’s realistic with a vengeance’, while The Observer concluded that ‘Lessing writes about the parts other novelists cannot reach’.

In his exclusive essay for The Booker Prizes website, former Booker Prize judge and Professor of Modern English Literature John Mullan observes how the novel was ‘a surprising turn politically’ for Lessing, who had long been thought of as a writer of the Left. Mullan, who interviewed Lessing shortly after her Nobel win in 2008, said ‘it is not a renunciation of all Lessing’s former political ideals, but a matchless depiction of the psychology of idealism, and the ways in which it can topple into intolerance and self-deception’.

If you’d like to know more about the book, you can read John Mullan’s full essay here. We’ve also published an extract from the novel to whet your appetite, and have compiled a detailed reading guide, featuring insights into the novel from critics and Lessing herself, as well as a series of discussion points for book clubs.

We’d love to know what you think of The Good Terrorist - have you read the novel, or are you picking it up for the first time? Join us in reading – or re-reading –  it and please share your opinions in the comments or via our social channels. 

Finally, if you’d like to win a copy of the current UK edition of The Good Terrorist, published by 4th Estate, along with a limited-edition, money-can’t-buy Booker Prize tote bag, enter our competition via the link below. 

Good luck, and happy reading!