An American anthropologist is at a loose end in Botswana. She is ferociously intelligent and wonderfully inquisitive. She is also in love with Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who runs an experimental women-only utopian village in the Kalahari. At times wildly comic but also magnificently cerebral, Mating is a profound exploration of the human condition and a moving love story, circling the question 'what do men and women really want?'

Ned and Nina are trying to conceive, so when Ned jets off with no notice to the funeral of Douglas, a mysterious friend from his student days, Nina follows him so they can have sex on time. Douglas was the ringleader of a fellowship of chums at NYU and Nina is baffled by the extraordinary hold the group - and Douglas in particular - have on Ned. The novel explores the reconfiguring and reappraisal of the clique following Douglas's tragic death. 'Subtle Bodies' asks why we make the friends we do, why we keep them and how we make sense of our personal histories. It is a wise, funny and keenly...

'Mortals' constitutes the final element in Norman Rush's trilogy on the Western presence in contemporary southern Africa. Set in Botswana in the 1990s, it is a political adventure, a social comedy and a passionate love story.