Mortals

“A masterwork of literary art…. Mortals is a beautifully written, well-executed novel. It is written with passion, grace and flair…. Rush has a rare and beautiful gift of making readers feel true empathy for his characters…. A triumphant follow-up to Rush’s Mating.”

—Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“Full of situations that range from subtly humorous to near slapstick that reveal an unusually keen human insight.”

—The Denver Post

“Mortals is brilliant in its presentation of milieu, the heat, the squalor and the human misery of Botswana. The reader is immersed in an exotic culture and its political and social history rendered vivid by Rush’s prose.”

—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Well worth the wait…. Rush’s prose, wit and insight provide so many delights…. Mortals should solidify his reputation and win him new readers.”

—The Oregonian

“Wild and wonderful…. Rush inhabits the restless syncopative rhythms and associative bedlam of a male mind consumed by jealousy, disillusion and fading altruistic dreams. His observations are brutally accurate and funny.”

—The Charlotte Observer

“[An] absorbing and variegated novel… effortless and riddled with surprises…. For readers hankering after a novel of ideas, it doesn’t get much better than this.”

—The New York Observer

“The ideas are a brilliant bonus. The writing itself is intensely readable: not dry but juicy. It is rare for a novel of consciousness to be also a novel of action, but it is one of the distinctions of this book to be both.”

—The Village Voice

“Lucid, luminous, proudly literary prose…. Makes the erudition of Rushdie or Franzen seem show-off frippery by comparison.”

—The San Diego Union-Tribune

ALSO BY NORMAN RUSH

Mating

Whites

About the Author

Norman Rush was raised in Oakland, California, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. He has been an antiquarian book dealer and a college instructor, and, with his wife, Elsa, he lived and worked in Africa from 1978 to 1983.

His stories, essays, and reviews have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and other periodicals. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including an NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. Whites, a collection of stories, was published in 1986 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His first novel, Mating, was published in 1991 and was the recipient of the National Book Award. Mortals is his second novel.

Copyright

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2004

Copyright © 2003 by Norman Rush

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Universal Music Corp. on behalf of Volta Music Corp. for permission to print an excerpt from the song lyric “Town Without Pity,” words and music by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington. Copyright © by Universal Music Corp. on behalf of Volta Music Corp. (ASCAP). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Universal Music Corp. on behalf of Volta Music Corp.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Rush, Norman.

Mortals: a novel / Norman Rush.—1^st ed.

p. cm.

1. Americans—Botswana—Fiction. 2. African American physicians—Fiction. 3. Government investigators— Fiction. 4. Revolutionaries—Fiction. 5. Botswana—Fiction. 1. Title.

PS3568.U727M67 2003

813?.54—dc21 2002043289

eISBN: 978-0-307-78936-5

www.vintagebooks.com

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