"The passions of these three entangle them with a local populist leader, Samuel Kerekang, whose purposes are grotesquely misconstrued by the CIA, fixated as the agency is on the astonishing collapse of world socialism and the simultaneous, paradoxical triumph of radical black nationalism in South Africa, Botswana's neighbor. And when a small but violent insurrection erupts in the wild northern part of the country, inspired by Kerekang but stoked by the erotic and political intrigues of the American trio - the outcome is explosive and often explosively funny." Along the way, there are many pleasures. Letters from Ray's brilliantly hostile brother and Iris's woebegone sister provide a running commentary on contemporary life in America. Africa and Africans are powerfully evoked, and the expatriate scene is cheerfully skewered. SYNOPSIS “An astounding accomplishment. . . . [A] detonation of talent that threatens to incinerate competitors for miles around.” —The Christian Science Monitor About this guide The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Norman Rush's Mortals. We hope they will provide useful ways of thinking and talking about this greatly anticipated novel by the author of Mating, which won the National Book Award in 1991. FROM THE CRITICS Time 12 years [after his first novel Mating], we have the remarkable Mortals, which gives us the late-blooming Rush as challenging and surprising and uncompromising as ever.-Lev Grossman The Washington Post Rush has written his new novel, Mortals, as the second installment in a trilogy on Western encounters with Africa, and in both its wry-yet-forceful narrative style and its generous conceptual reach, it is a worthy successor to the restless, cerebral and searing work that Mating was. But where Mating charted obsessive affairs of the heart that opened out onto the wider world -- trailing in their wake everything from utopian socialism to feminism to Third World economic-development plans -- Mortals depicts from the outside a steady accumulation of inward torments: the collapse of certainties that guide a career and a political world, the unsettled business of a family's past, and most of all the dissolution of a marriage and all that goes with it, its reconfigurations of memory, hope and the most intimate sense of self. — Chris Lehmann Publishers Weekly From the beginning, the tone of Rush's eagerly awaited new novel is edgy and febrile-a harbinger of the unsettling events that will ensue. Ray Finch, a Milton scholar who teaches in a small secondary school in Botswana during the 1990s, is having an identity crisis. After many years as an undercover CIA agent, he has lost his emotional equilibrium, and he's strung out with suspicion and fear. Is his adored wife, Iris, on the verge of an affair? What's with Iris's warm relationship with the brother Ray despises-gay, witty Rex? How long can Ray suppress his growing disillusionment with the agency's arrogant and ruthless methods? When Ray's chief sends him into the interior to hunt down the idealistic leader of a fledgling rebellion, Ray's fears transmogrify into living nightmares, and the novel, already a textured, erotic portrait of a disintegrating marriage and a society in flux, becomes a political thriller infused with violence. Ray is acutely aware of the cultural dissonance introduced by Western society. According to Iris's lover, a black American doctor, Christianity has wrecked Africa; Publisheda t Twenty Seven Dollars.  Knopf Publishing Group 0-679-40622-0 / 9780679406228
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