I’m deeply grateful to my editor, Ann Close, and to my agent, Andrew Wylie.
And I acknowledge the great good luck I have in my family… Henry, Ding, Robert, Chris, Nick, Sheila, Lynda, Laura, Bruce, Renee, Peter, Josh, Luke, John, Max, Maia, Chloe, Mason, Jameson, Miranda, Gillian, and Sylvie.
I also want to acknowledge the encouragement given, when it was needed, by my sister-in-law, Ruth Gonze, and by our second family, the Roths.
ACCLAIM FOR NORMAN RUSH’S
“Brilliant….
“Remarkable…. Rush [is] as challenging and surprising and uncompromising as ever.”
“It’s no small feat to write engagingly about love, religion, philosophy, and war, and it’s no small feat to end up with something that dances on the line between earthy and stately. Each of [
“Psychologically acute, meticulously written [and] ambitious…. Should help console those still unreconciled to Graham Greene’s death.”
“Rush’s political wisdom, honed by the years he spent working in Africa, is enhanced by an acutely moral literary sensibility and his core humanity; together, the traits… imbue his work with depth and grace.”
“Complex and accomplished…. In both its wry-yet-forceful narrative style and its generous conceptual research, it is a worthy successor to [
“Few other books so powerfully convey the uneasy connection between intimacy and absurdity, the way that the minutiae of everyday domestic life can become so loaded with meaning…. Read it if you care at all about some very old, very vexed questions—about matters such as the knowledge of good and evil, or the nature of human wisdom and human folly.”
“Broadens the scope of [Rush’s] fiction while going deeper into the human dynamic of a country in the midst of profound upheaval.
“Bitterly funny. Mr. Rush has a canny understanding for Africa, a profound appreciation for the fine points of romantic love, a muscular style of description, and an eye for character so frighteningly sharp that it argues against running across the man at parties.”
“The great joy in reading [Rush’s] work is that it seems to proceed from an unshakable belief in the capacity of the novel to embrace everything: global politics, the nature of love, race relations, philosophy, religion, literature, the exact feeling of the dust in Botswana…. There is no denying its intellectual meatiness and its moments of intensity.”
“A novel as ambitious and spell-binding as his first…. Rush weaves an astonishing array of subjects into his story, from Freud, religion and politics to life, death and Africa. Rush is a master of his characters’ minds…. Within [their] intense internal dialogues are thought-provoking, smart and often hilarious nuggets.”
“The sheer energy and ambition of
“Breathtakingly ambitious. By the book’s end, Rush has given us masterful slices both of Africa’s indelible beauty and of its ongoing chaos. Rush is a real seer, and he captivates us with his audacious fictional vision.”
“A serious work that calls attention to the indissoluble link between the public and the private…. You’ll find it hard not to be impressed with the scope of Rush’s vision.”
“[Rush] is economical with language, choosing the best words to distill ideas and express them in gems…. [He] has real affection for Botswana and its people. His rendering of the cadences of their speech is just right.”
