One of the most hypnotic reading experiences I've ever had... every feminist would be proud to claim this extraordinary novel as her own
Margaret Forster
Sunday Telegraph
[A] striking success
Guardian
Dizzyingly readable... has that feeling, rare and unforgettable in contemporary fiction, of everything being at stake - ethically, emotionally and imaginatively... The best novel ... Read morepublished this year, and doubtless for some to come
Independent
A comedy of manners crackling with ideas: about feminism, commitment, politics, Africa and the West. Rush brilliantly sustains the voice of his central character... and makes the post-colonial city and the new community itself familiar and concrete
Observer
Exhilarating... vigorous and luminous. Few books evoke so eloquently the state of love at its apogee
New York Times
[A] politically astute epic... [with] hypnotic prose... Essential reading
Max Lui
Independent
An extremely sophisticated dramatic monologue... a serious romance refracted comically through the mind of a startlingly individual narrator... Rush has ingenuity to burn
New Republic
Funny, unflinching, and shockingly honest
New Yorker
The best rendering of erotic politics since D.H. Lawrence... a marvellous novel
New York Review of Books
Thick with meditations on matters scholarly and literary, political and psychological... [The narrator's] introspection and argumentation are infused with a contagious joie de vivre... Delightful [and] compelling
The Millions
In the pyrotechnics that erupt on the page, in its fecundity of ideas, Mating has much in common with the writing of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and John Fowles... A dazzling original
The Philadelphia Inquirer
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
Robert Christgau An audaciously clever novel with substance as well as flash
Detroit Free Press
A complex and moving love story... breathtaking in its cunningly intertwined intellectual sweep and brio
Chicago Tribune
Witty, raunchy... prodigiously aspiring... wonderfully varied and pungent... a remarkable book
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Even readers who remember the luminous stories in Rush's debut, Whites, may not be prepared for the cleverness, humor, insight into human nature and intellectual acuity demonstrated in this accomplished novel
Publisher's Weekly
Brilliantly written... utterly sui generis... Rush has alerted us to the transfiguring power of passion
Mirabella
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
Independent five star review
[It] has a playful humour... The quirkily acquisitive heroine stands out
Anna Scott
Guardian
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