All Doris Lessing's short novels and stories are now collected into two volumes, This Was The Old Chef's Country and The Sun Between Their Feet. This volume contains all the stories from the original book entitled This Was The Old Chief's Country and three of the short novels from Five, the book which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1954. 'I believe,' writes Doris Lessing, "that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like a old fever, latent always in their blood; or it like an old wounded throbbing in the bones as the air changes. That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of thought. Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.' In this Edition: The Old Chief Mshlanga A Sunrise on the Veld No Witchcraft for Sale The Second Hut The Nuisance The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange Little Tembi Old John's Place 'Leopard' George Winter in July A Home for the Highland Cattle Eldorado The Antheap Includes the Preface for the 1964 Collection and a new Preface for the 1973 Collection. All of these stories appeared in African Stories, 1963.

The second volume of Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories, and a classic work from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. "As for these stories – when I write one, it is as if I open a gate into a landscape which is always there. Time has nothing to do with it. A certain kind of pulse starts beating, and I recognise it: it is time I wrote another story from that landscape, external and internal at the same time, which was once the Old Chief’s Country." — Doris Lessing, from the Preface. This much-acclaimed collection of stories vividly evokes both the grandeur of Africa and the glare of its sun and the wide open space, as well as the great, irresolvable tensions between whites and blacks. Tales of poor white farmers and their lonely wives, of storm air thick with locusts, of ants and pomegranate trees, black servants and the year of hunger in a native village – all combine to present a powerful image of a continent which seems incorruptible in spite of all the people who plough, mine and plunder it to make their living. In Doris Lessing’s own words, "Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape."