Mortals

norman rush

At once a political adventure, a portrait of a passionate but imperiled marriage, and an acrobatic novel of ideas, Mortals marks Norman Rush’s return to the territory he has made his own, the southern African nation of Botswana. Nobody here is entirely what he claims to be. Ray Finch is not just a middle-aged Milton scholar but a CIA agent. His lovely and doted-upon wife Iris is also a possible adulteress. And Davis Morel, the black alternative physician who is treating her--while undertaking a quixotic campaign to de-Christianize Africa—may also be her lover.

As a spy, the compulsively literate Ray ought to have no trouble confirming his suspicions. But there’s the distraction of actual spying. Most of all, there’s the problem of love, which Norman Rush anatomizes in all its hopeless splendor in a novel that would have delighted Milton, Nabokov, and Graham Greene.

Genres fictionafricacontemporaryliteratureliterary fictionnovelsbotswanaamerican fiction21st centuryunfinished

736 pages, Paperback

First published May 27,2003

Places

botswana,

This edition

Format: 736 pages, Paperback
Published: July 13, 2004 by Vintage
ISBN: 9780679737117
ASIN: 0679737111
Language: English

Characters More characters

About the author

norman rush

Norman Rush (born October 24, 1933 in Oakland, California) is an American novelist whose introspective novels and short stories are set in Botswana in the 1980s. He is the son of Roger and Leslie (Chesse) Rush. He was the recipient of the 1991 National Book Award and the 1992 Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for his novel Mating.

Rush was born in San Francisco and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. After working for fifteen years as a book dealer, he changed careers to become a teacher and found he had more time to write. He submitted a short story about his teaching experiences to The New Yorker, and it was published in 1978.

Rush and his wife worked as co-workers for the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978 to 1983, which provided material for a collection of short stories he published as Whites in 1986, and for which he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His Botswana experience was also used in his first novel, Mating, which won a National Book Award for fiction in 1991, and in his second novel, Mortals.

He lives in Rockland County, New York.