Memoirs of a Survivor
Doris Lessing
 The story takes place in a near-future Britain where society has broken down due to an unspecified disaster. Family units themselves have broken down and survivors band together into loose units for basic survival. The unnamed narrator ends up with 'custody' of a teenage girl named Emily Cartwright. Emily herself has unspecified trauma in her past that the main character does not probe at. Hugo, an odd mix of cat and dog, comes with Emily. Due to the growing scarcity of resources, the animal is in constant danger of being eaten. Periodically, the narrator is able, through meditating on a certain wall in her flat, to traverse space and time. Many of these visions are about Emily's sad childhood under the care of her harsh father and distant mother. At the end of the novel, the main character's strange new family breaks through dimensional barriers via the wall, and walks into a much better world.