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Mating: A Novel
Not yet published
Expected 3 Feb 26NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER Is love between equals possible? This modern classic is a delightful intellectual love story that explores the deepest canyons of romantic love even as it asks large questions about society, geopolitics, and the mystery of what men and women really want.
“Luminous . . . Few books evoke the state of love at its apogee.” —The New York Times Book Review
“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 Books
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana. She has a noble and exacting mind, a compelling waist, and a busted thesis project. She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari—one in which he is virtually the only man.
What ensues is an exhilarating quest and an exuberant comedy of “A dryly comic love story about grown-up people who take the life of the mind seriously.” —Newsweek
“Luminous . . . Few books evoke the state of love at its apogee.” —The New York Times Book Review
“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 Books
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana. She has a noble and exacting mind, a compelling waist, and a busted thesis project. She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari—one in which he is virtually the only man.
What ensues is an exhilarating quest and an exuberant comedy of “A dryly comic love story about grown-up people who take the life of the mind seriously.” —Newsweek
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Expected publication February 3, 2026
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About the author
Norman Rush
23 books113 followersNorman 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.
Rush was born in San Francisco and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. After working for fifteen years as a book dealer, he changed careers to become a teacher and found he had more time to write. He submitted a short story about his teaching experiences to The New Yorker, and it was published in 1978.
Rush and his wife worked as co-workers for the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978 to 1983, which provided material for a collection of short stories he published as Whites in 1986, and for which he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His Botswana experience was also used in his first novel, Mating, which won a National Book Award for fiction in 1991, and in his second novel, Mortals.
He lives in Rockland County, New York.
Rush was born in San Francisco and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1956. After working for fifteen years as a book dealer, he changed careers to become a teacher and found he had more time to write. He submitted a short story about his teaching experiences to The New Yorker, and it was published in 1978.
Rush and his wife worked as co-workers for the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978 to 1983, which provided material for a collection of short stories he published as Whites in 1986, and for which he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His Botswana experience was also used in his first novel, Mating, which won a National Book Award for fiction in 1991, and in his second novel, Mortals.
He lives in Rockland County, New York.
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