Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook (1962). New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.*

A novel fascinating in its structure: Free Women is told in five parts, each with a third-person narrator, telling the story of Anna Wulf and her friend Molly, and the men and children that fill out their lives. These sections are interrupted by Anna's notebooks, in which she tries to sort out her own life story (told in the first person), by allocating different aspects of her life into different colored notebooks.

For instance, her time in Africa is told in the black notebook, and he gradual straying from communism is told in the red notebook. Eventually she falls in love with an American writer, and is driven to bring all these disparate elements together in the golden notebook of the title.

This fractured structure enables Lessing to cover not only a great breadth of narrative, but also to fully investigate her themes of communism, class, and the feminist movement in such a way as to not have to privilege any of them.