Her novels are Shadow of a Sun(1964), reprinted under the originally intended title The Shadow of the Sunin 1991, The Game (1967), Possession: A Romance(1990), which was a popular winner of the Booker Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale(2000). The novels The Virgin in the Garden(1978), Still Life(1985), and Babel Tower(1996) form part of a four-novel sequence, contemplated from the early 1960s onwards, which will be completed by A Whistling Womanin 2002. Her shorter fiction is collected in Sugar and Other Stories(1987), Angels and Insects(1992), The Matisse Stories(1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye(1994), and Elementals(1998). All these are much translated, a matter in which she takes great interest (she is a formidable linguist). She is also the author of several works of criticism and the editor of The Oxford Book of the English Short Story, an anthology that attempts, for the first time, to examine the national character through its national writers; an exercise only flawed by the anthology’s modest omission of its editor’s own stories, as she is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of the shorter form now living. Her status was officially recognized with the award of a CBE (commander of the British Empire) in 1990 and a damehood in 1999. The lure is simply too powerful. Denoon is her man. Fast forward past Nar's extensive research and many reflection on society and culture, bondage and freedom (on one level, Mating is a book of ideas) and Nar is off on her expedition to cross one hundred miles of Kalahari Desert on foot, solo, with a donkey, to reach Tsau. After all, what man, even a man like Denoon, wouldn't be impressed with such an bold, death-defying venture?

The best rendering of erotic politics…since D.H. Lawrence…The voice of Rush’s narrator is immediate, instructive and endearing.” — The New York Review of BooksExhilarating... vigorous and luminous. Few books evoke so eloquently the state of love at its apogee I guess what I’d want to say is that people should look at ‘Mating’ as the account of an experiment,” he said. “In terms of translating what’s in the book to their own personal lives, they should consider what will make an experiment work — but remember that it’s an experiment with no guaranteed outcome.” I wore myself out collecting enough wood for a ring fire, got us all set up inside it, went into my tent, and closed my eyes, and immediately there were lions in the neighborhood. There may have been only one. I heard a roar like no other sound on earth. I felt it in my atoms. This is my reward for taking precautions, was my first thought. I made myself emerge. I peered around. My [donkeys] were standing pressed together and shaking pathetically. I looked for glints from lion eyes out in the dark but saw nothing. In the morning I found it hard to eat. There was terror in me. I could die in this place, it was clear.” She wasn’t skeptical. She appreciated it, as writing. She noted that I wasn’t happy with the kinds of responses I was getting, but was entirely supportive for decades. She didn’t think I could change, and felt bad for me. How can Norman Rush's 1991 Mating rank among the great 20th-century novels? Let me count the ways. With all respect to Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Isabel Archer, no modern male has imagined a female protagonist as vivid and complex as Mating's unnamed lover-anthropologist-adventurer. Few if any white novelists have written so easily about the underrepresented turf of Africa

Flirtatious banter ensues, in English and Setswana, and she inquires if Tsau—a closed experimental community—would accept her as a volunteer. “You tempt me,” retorts Denoon, “but I have to say no. Of course what would make you irresistible would be if you know something about cooperage. Or taxidermy, say.” “Sorry, I said.” 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. Weeks, Sheldon (First Quarter 1993). "A Disappointing Novel". Africa Today. Indiana University Press. 40 (1): 78–79. JSTOR 4186892. A novel of real, original ideas about feminism, love, politics, race and anthropology... This is a story with blood in its veins. And the narrator is the best female character created by a male author I have ever come across

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Maybe that’s partly because it is centered on a romantic relationship. But in Rush’s depiction, love is a serious and challenging intellectual endeavor for those who attempt it. You didn’t publish your first book, Whites, until you were fifty-three. What were you writing all those years? There’s a sense from the very beginning of your work of what you want to do. It’s not every novelist that would write a first novel about a successful novelist. The writing is strong but quite relentless; the fact that the narrator is not very sympathetic -- and so often a manipulator -- makes it difficult to empathize with her -- and at a more neutral distance her story simply isn't that engaging.

The Virginia Quarterly Review mentions the first-person narrator's "emotional and intellectual entanglement" with her beloved, but concludes with the general, positive statement that "The context of their encounter and of the ensuing relationship plays a significant role in their experience, and is forcefully depicted in the sophisticated, thought-provoking novel." [9] I would hear again that in Tsau we had everything we have a right to demand in a continent as abused and threatened as Africa: decent food and clean water, leisure, decent and variable work, self-governance, discussion groups on anything, medical care.Fittingly, her first glance at Denoon occurs at a boisterous political debate. The topic? Whether Africa, in the 1980s, ought to pursue a capitalist or a socialist development model (the destruction of the Berlin Wall and Nelson Mandela’s release from prison are a decade away). Denoon’s opponent is a sneering young Botswana Marxist. Mating (1991) is a novel by American author Norman Rush. It is a first-person narrative by an unnamed American anthropology graduate student in Botswana around 1980. It focuses on her relationship with Nelson Denoon, a controversial American social scientist who has founded an experimental matriarchal village in the Kalahari desert. This novel first appeared in 1991, but still seems extraordinary, innovative, sui generis. (...) I hope I’m not making the whole thing sound like a mere display of braininess. This is a story with blood in its veins. And the narrator is the best female character created by a male author I have ever come across." - Brandon Robshaw, Independent on Sunday Does the narrator make the right choice by leaving Denoon and Africa? Is she correct in thinking Denoon had suffered a nervous breakdown and become "insanely passive," an "impostor," after his ordeal in the desert? Or did Denoon have a genuinely mystical experience? To me, there’s no pessimism in it,” said Piepenbring, who coordinated The Paris Review’s “Mating” book club in 2015, when he worked at the magazine. “That was exactly the kind of relationship I wanted to be in.”

I was doing a sort of retrospective analysis of how people who had come to, maybe not a consummate relationship, but a compelling relationship with a significant other,” Rush said. Nelson's current project is entirely off the beaten path, a utopian community, populated and for the most part led by women, called Tsau. The narrator had hoped to show in her Stanford doctoral thesis that fertility among “remote dwellers” varies from season to season depending on what the gatherers can find, but she has learned that there are no gatherers in Botswana; people everywhere are eating canned food and breakfast cereal or handouts from the World Food Program. As a result, she retreats to the capital, Gabarone, where she socializes with the local expatriates and works her way through affairs with several men who offer her nothing permanently satisfying. From the last of these, Z, a spy for the British High Commission, she learns of Sekopololo (“The Key”), a project to create an entire new village in the north-central Kalahari Desert. What especially excites her about this project is that it is run by Nelson Denoon, a legendary social scientist.

Norman Rush

Nelson seems happy to see the narrator again although he asks her to keep their previous meeting a secret. As she begins to fit into life in the village she finds allies in some of the other women and in Nelson a man like none she has ever known. When, after a long and awkward courtship, he invites her to move into his house she accepts and their romance begins in earnest.