The Four-Gated City
Doris Lessing
 The series Children of Violence develops the central character, Martha Quest, from her birth in Southern Africa at the end of the First World War, through an adolescence, youth and marriage shaped by the Second World War. The Four-Gated City is set in Post-War Britain. Martha is in London as the 1950s begin. She is integrally part of the social history of the time - the Cold War, the Aldermaston Marches, Swinging London, the deepening of poverty and social anarchy. The volume ends with the century in the grip of World War Three. In the year 1997, Martha dies on a contaminated island off the northwest coast of Scotland. Most of the people of Britain have died before her, in 1978, of multiple afflictions: bubonic plague, nerve gases, nuclear explosions.