Anna Wulf, a writer in 1950s London, divides her life into four coloured notebooks — black (writing), red (politics), yellow (fiction inside fiction), blue (diary).

Each is an attempt to keep experience ordered, rational, containable as she struggles adjusting to life as a new mother. The “golden notebook” arrives later — separate from the others, and not a synthesis, and it slowly fractures the compartments altogether.

Lessing tracks communism, motherhood, sex, artistic failure, mental unravelling, but the book isn’t interested in tidy ideological positions. It’s interested in what happens when the structures you’ve relied on to make sense of yourself stop holding. 

The book still feels contemporary because it refuses the self as a brand, something unified.