The Grass Is Singing (1950) is Lessing's first novel. It is about a young person growing to maturity. It takes place in Lessing's childhood home, Rhodesia (later renamed Zimbabwe).

Bessie Head, a Black novelist born in the Republic of South Africa and forced to flee to Botswana for her anti-apartheid political activities, published When the Rain Clouds Gather in 1968.

Burger's Daughter (1979), by South African author Nadine Gordimer, is about a young white woman whose parents are political activists working to end the system of apartheid, which institutionalized the under-class status of the nation's African peoples.

Alan Sillitoe, known as one of Britain's Angry Young Men, wrote Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). Its working-class protagonist captures the cynicism of his rootless postwar generation.

Lessing's The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980) is the second novel in her "space fiction" series Canopus...