In the early 1980s, Botswana boasted an unlikely concentration of nascent literary talent: Alexander McCall Smith was teaching at the University of Botswana; Hilary Mantel was living with her geologist husband in Lobatse, an hour’s drive from Gaborone; and Norman Rush was co-managing (with his wife, Elsa) the US Peace Corps. Was there something in the lack of water, there on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, that nurtured literary talent? “I’m sure it was simply happenstance,” Norman told me a few years ago. He arrived in Botswana expecting to get a lot of reading and writing done, but his duties during his five years there left him with very little spare time. “I managed to read Bessie Head standing up at the Botswana Book Centre.”

Bruns, set in a fictionalized town based on Mahalapye (notable for straddling the Tropic of Capricorn), marks the debut of a narrative voice that he later utilized in his novel Mating (1991), which won the US National Book Award. The story was first published in The New Yorker (an earlier story, After the Life Class, was published there in 1978, before he went to Botswana), and is the linchpin of his collection, Whites, shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.

First published in The New Yorker in 1983, online here. It was collected in Whites, Alfred A Knopf, 1986