Through a crack in the wall of her flat, the narrator witnesses scenes from Emily’s past — memory, trauma, imagination — layered against the present breakdown outside.

Set in a near-future London sliding into social collapse, The Memoirs of a Survivor follows an unnamed woman who takes in a teenage girl, Emily, as institutions fail and the city fragments. Lessing keeps the tone restrained and observational. The novel is about how collapse feels from inside an ordinary room.

One of her quieter, stranger works — and a key bridge between her realist novels and later speculative writing.