In 1956, some seven years after departed for England, Doris Lessing returned home to Southern Rhodesia. It was a journey that was both personal – a revisiting of a land and people she knew – and, inevitably, political: Southern Rhodesia was now part of the Central African Federation, where the tensions between colonialism and self-determination were at their most deeply felt.

‘Going Home’ is a book that combines journalism, reportage and memoir, humour, farce and tragedy; a book fired by the love of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers for a country and a continent that she felt compelled to leave.