At once a political adventure, a social comedy and a passionate love story, Mortals chronicles the misadventures of three expat Americans in 1990s Botswana: a contract CIA agent, operating undercover as a teacher of Milton; his beloved but disaffected wife; and an iconoclastic black holistic physician on a personal mission to 'lift the yoke of Christian belief from Africa'. The machinations of these three entangle them with a local populist leader. And when a violent but pathetic insurrection erupts - stoked in part by the erotic and political intrigues of the American trio - the outcome is both explosive and explosively funny. Mortals constitutes the final element in Norman Rush's trilogy on the Western presence in contemporary southern Africa, and examines with wit and insight the dilemmas of power, religion, rebellion, and contending versions of liberation and love, through lives lived ardently in an unforgiving land. --'Rush is masterful at unfolding the tender, laconic truths of love, lust and guilt' Guardian--'Serious and well written-I enjoyed every word' Observer--'I could not stop reading it-A remarkable book' Daily Telegraph--'In the venerable tradition of Graham Greene a

Author Biography

Raised in Oakland, California, Norman Rush graduated from Swarthmore College and worked as an antiquarian book dealer and a teacher. He lived in Africa from 1978 to 1983. In 1986, his short story collection, Whites, was a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist. Mating, a novel, won the 1991 National Book Award for Fiction and the International Fiction Prize (Irish Times/Aer Lingus). He lives with his wife Elsa in New York.