The Golden Notebook is a 1962 novel by the British writer Doris Lessing. It, like the two books that followed it, enters the realm of what Margaret Drabble in "The Oxford Companion to English Literature" called Lessing's "inner space fiction"; her work that explores mental and societal breakdown. The novel contains powerful anti-war and anti-Stalinist messages, an extended analysis of communism and the Communist Party in England from the 1930s to the 1950s, and an examination of the budding sexual liberation and women's liberation movements.