Love, Again is Doris Lessing's first novel since The Fifth Child in 1988. It is based around the discovery of the journals of Julie Vairon, an intelligent and lovely but wayward French girl from Martinique, brought to Provence at the end of the nineteenth century by one of her devoted lovers. Julie was a musician, a diarist, an artist, a 'free woman' ahead of her time. Nearly eighty years after her death in 1912, her music and her art illuminate the lives of the characters of Love, Again , when Sarah Durham, a theatrical producer, commissions a play based on her life. The play captivates all who come into contact with it, and dramatically changes the lives of everyone involved. For Sarah — an old woman — the change is profound; she falls in love with two younger men, one after the other, causing her to relive her own stages of growing up, from immature and infantile love (the beautiful and androgynous Bill) to the mature love, Henry.

This is the third in the novel-sequence Canopus in Argos: Archives . The first was Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta . The second, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five . The fourth will be The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 .

Shikasta is the first of a series of novels with the overall title Canopus in Argos: Archives. The second will be The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. The third will be The Sirian Experiments.

Many years in the future, city life has broken down, communications have failed and food supplies are dwin-dling. From her window a middle-aged woman watches things fall apart and records what she witnesses: hordes of people migrating to the countryside, gangs of children roaming the streets. One day, a young girl, Emily, is brought to her house by a stranger and left in her care. A strange, precocious adolescent, drawn to the tribal streetlife and its barbaric rituals, Emily is unafraid of the harsh world outside, while our narrator retreats into her own hidden world where reality fades and the past is revisited...