Lessing turns her attention away from fiction and toward the real, yet invisible loyalties that shape us.

These essays examine how easily we surrender to group identity, the political, ideological, national, and how quickly independent thought dissolves once we feel safely aligned. The “prison” isn’t imposed from outside. We walk into it, decorate it and then defend it. 

Written in the mid-1980s, it feels uncomfortably current. A slim book with long echoes.