Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature. And her book mentioned in the interview hold in October 7, 2006, The Cleft has already been published in American. LONDON -- For more than 20 years, author Doris Lessing has lived on a quiet block in North London, in a brick Hampstead house among a row of such homes, as straight and steady as a line of toy soldiers. Long favored by artists and intellectuals, her neighborhood is an ideal mix of solitude and activity, just a short, uphill walk from shops and cafes and busy, curving streets, a place that on this warm afternoon could convince you the world is but one long coffee break. The 86-year-old Lessing knows better. "It's extremely affluent around here and people just take it for granted," she says. "I don't remember anything like this when I first came to London." She has known many homes before living here: A country house in Persia (now Iran), a farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a boarding house in South Africa, cold water flats around London. She has married twice, raised three children, watched this city rise from the dust of World War II, looked on in shock as the great truths of her youth _ apartheid, Communism, Nazism, the British empire _ all vanished. "When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s," she recalls. "What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire _ nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?" The author of the classic "The Golden Notebook" and more than 40 other works, including an upcoming novel, "The Cleft," Lessing can be a severe figure in her author photos, with her gray-white hair pulled back in a bun, dark eyes set in a cold stare as if engaged with the gravest matters. But in person, she is warmer, a casual presence who rises at 5 each morning to feed the