The Grass is Singing dramatizes the racial tensions between British colonialists and African natives in Southern Rhodesia by telling the story of a troubled sort of love triangle among perennially unsuccessful small farmer Dick Turner, his intelligent but repressed wife Mary, and their native houseboy Moses. As she despairs in Dick and his attempts to improve their farm, Mary finds herself falling under the power of Moses. In the end, Moses murders her, and Dick Turner goes insane over being forced off of his farm by a more successful neighboring farmer.
Doris Lessing published the novel, her first, in 1950, depicting the Southern Rhodesian society she knew intimately as it was in the 1940s. The Grass is Singing was adapted into a film as Killing Heat in 1981. As with The Golden Notebook (1962), the later novel that won her international attention, this first novel demonstrated Lessing's moral strength as a writer—the sort that the Swedish Academy would cite in awarding her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, calling her "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."
