Here are 100 books that Mating fans have personally recommended if you like
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Botswana is not one of the sexy African countries; I sometimes joke in response to people who tell me, a writer from Botswana, that they have never before heard of any writers or literature from Botswana. By that, I mean that my small, landlocked country hardly ever makes international news and is often overshadowed by bigger, more populous countries on the continent. However, there has been a plethora of writing from Botswana published mostly within the African continent but also increasingly in the West. I think this list of books is a great introduction to anyone who is curious to know the country and its people.
My home village of Serowe is a place I find fascinating for its history, its culture, its people and their peculiar mix of self-regard and obeisance. Bessie Head, a writer who has had the most influence on my work, was a great chronicler of Serowe throughout her oeuvre of brilliant novels and short stories. But it is this book, a mix of social and oral history, and interviews with the inhabitants of Serowe (of different races, cultures, and classes), that really has my heart.
Covering various historical eras and years spanning from 1875 to around 1963, the book’s subjects ran the gamut from the reign of Khama the Great to the origins of the green milking rubber hedge that is still ubiquitous in the village today.
In Serowe:Village of the Rain Wind, Bessie Head blends her skills as a novelist with the actual words of nearly one hundred inhabitants of a Botswanan village called Serowe to present a clear picture of the village community and its history. Serowe is one of the best-known villages in Africa, the capital of the people ruled by the Khamas, of whom Tshekedi and Seretse are the most famous. This collection of writings also tells of a remarkable transition between the setting up and the dismantling of white colonialism in Botswana.
Botswana is not one of the sexy African countries; I sometimes joke in response to people who tell me, a writer from Botswana, that they have never before heard of any writers or literature from Botswana. By that, I mean that my small, landlocked country hardly ever makes international news and is often overshadowed by bigger, more populous countries on the continent. However, there has been a plethora of writing from Botswana published mostly within the African continent but also increasingly in the West. I think this list of books is a great introduction to anyone who is curious to know the country and its people.
I love a classic tale of forbidden love, and this book explores love across class lines and across traditional Tswana values and modern values: a poor, uneducated boy who fled his family cattlepost and escaped to Gaborone, where he falls in love with the privately educated daughter of a retired diplomat.
What I love about this book, too, is how it provides a portrait of Gaborone at a certain time (the book was published in 1981) and the various people who made the city their home—upwardly mobile Batswana, political refugees from both Botswana and South Africa, diamond smugglers, officers from the colonial government and as the rural wide-eyed boy observes, “men wearing women’s attire and vice-versa…unbelievably high heels on both men and women.”
Botswana is not one of the sexy African countries; I sometimes joke in response to people who tell me, a writer from Botswana, that they have never before heard of any writers or literature from Botswana. By that, I mean that my small, landlocked country hardly ever makes international news and is often overshadowed by bigger, more populous countries on the continent. However, there has been a plethora of writing from Botswana published mostly within the African continent but also increasingly in the West. I think this list of books is a great introduction to anyone who is curious to know the country and its people.
I love this humorous coming-of-age story narrated by a naïve yet academically smart girl who is juggling the various conflicting truths of her life—what she is taught in school, what she learns at home, what she learns from her friends and her siblings, what she is told about how life is and what she observes for herself. How is a person to reconcile all these truths?
By becoming the Queen of England, which is what Monei, the narrator, says she wants to become when she grows up since the Queen is the only woman, as far as Monei can tell, who can make decisions. This is one of the funniest books I have ever read. Dow brilliantly captures the perplexed voice of a growing girl and the idiom of Botswana life around Independence.
Unity Dow's third novel, Juggling Truths portrays the childhood of Monei Ntuka in the Botswanan village of Mochudi in Africa. Go to the past with me, so you can take the past to the future, asks her Nkoko. Nei takes us on an extraordinary journey through the many truths that shape her life; the truths of the colonisers and their churches and of her own people. We travel with her through dreams and share the wisdom of her grandmother as she lets the never-ending stories weave their own reality in face of a universe of conflicting truths. Unity Dow recreates…
Botswana is not one of the sexy African countries; I sometimes joke in response to people who tell me, a writer from Botswana, that they have never before heard of any writers or literature from Botswana. By that, I mean that my small, landlocked country hardly ever makes international news and is often overshadowed by bigger, more populous countries on the continent. However, there has been a plethora of writing from Botswana published mostly within the African continent but also increasingly in the West. I think this list of books is a great introduction to anyone who is curious to know the country and its people.
I love short stories for all the meaning, depth, substance, and sense of a full life they can reveal in a few short pages, and these short stories by Wame Molefhe do just that.
They are intimate and lovely, and in elegant prose, they reveal women in the thick of life, caught in treacherous circumstances, solitarily mourning extramarital lovers, mourning same-sex love they were not brave enough to pursue, mourning a best friend who might have had an affair with one’s husband thus exposing her to disease.
The characters' names recur in most of the stories, though each character is different, navigating a different set of circumstances. The effect is of intimacy, of encountering and re-encountering relatives or friends around the corner, at the supermarket, at a funeral, or a wedding.
WAME MOLEFHE's stories have a gentle, unassuming yet intimate and captivating feel to them. Set in Botswana, the stories trace the lives of characters whose paths cross and re-cross each others', some times in and through love, at other times through tragedy. And through them the author brings to bear a woman's perspective on the societal mores in which sexual abuse, homophobia and AIDS, among others, flourish and spread. The social content and views are never proclaimed as a loud agenda; instead, it forms a 'natural' backdrop to the lives of the characters, something that may raise a wry comment…
I’m not a genre purist. I adore combining classic forms in new and exciting ways to make stories that have never been told before. The novels on this list are like that. They refuse to obey genre rules. Detective fiction suggests our questions have answers. The truth is rational and we can discover it. The supernatural elements of occult fiction say otherwise. Human consciousness cannot comprehend the nature of reality. Our investigations fail to understand our lives—the best we can do is explain them away. When these perspectives collide, it can result in interesting ways to see the world, familiar but fresh, as we have never known it before.
I love the Jimmy Paz novels. I wish there were more of them. Gruber’s are the most conventional crime plots on my list—tightly-crafted, intricate, and intelligent. His detective is the archetypal hero: smart, resourceful, big-hearted, brave. But in this world, science and rational deduction are insufficient to solve the crime because reality is not just unknown. It is unknowable. This is the cardinal sin of the detective genre. Even worse, Gruber completely gets away with it. With forays into Siberian Shamanism and Santeria, Tropic of Night is as much an investigation of consciousness and perception as it is the hunt for a murderous warlock. When the orishas finally arrive for the climax, my hands trembled. I got some small inkling of what it means for the fear of god to be the beginning of wisdom.
Jane Doe had been a promising anthropologist, an expert on shamanism. Now she is nothing, a shadow. After faking her own suicide, she is living under an assumed identity in Miami, with a traumatised little girl to protect. Everyone thinks Jane is dead - or so she hopes.
Then the killings start: a series of ritualistic murders that terrifies the entire city. The investigating detective, Jimmy Paz, locates the witnesses to these events but they can recall almost nothing, as though their memories have been erased. As if a spell has been cast on them...
After retiring from a career in climate science, I reinvented myself as an English teacher, a yoga instructor, and a writer. I write personal essays about my life experiences, in particular my time teaching in Thailand. Before I traveled to Thailand, while I was there, and when I returned home to the US, I devoured every book I could find that could help me make sense of Thai culture and manage as a farang (foreigner, Westerner) in the Land of Smiles. Here are my five picks for helping other farangs understand Thailand.
If the subtitle of Fieldwork wasn’t A Novel, I might have tagged it differently, because Mischa Berlinski is the name of both the author and the first-person narrator of this intricately woven tale.
The story, a murder mystery with cross-cultural dimensions, spans generations and continents and includes a fictional Thai hill tribe, early 20th-century American missionaries, mid-century Western anthropologists, and Mischa, a contemporary American journalist.
I loved that Mischa and his girlfriend move to Thailand on a whim after she learns online that all one needs to teach abroad is “a native command of English and a healthy pulse.” That observation and other aspects of her experience teaching in Thailand mirrored my own.
When his girlfriend takes a job in Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, planning to enjoy himself and work as little as possible. But one evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story: a charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead - a suicide - in the Thai prison where she was serving a life sentence for murder.Curious at first, Mischa is soon immersed in the details of her story, and this brilliant, haunting novel expands into a mystery set among the Thai hill tribes, whose way of life became a battleground…
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I was drawn to Harness’ incredible memoir because she speaks truth to power from an Indigenous perspective as a survivor of Indian adoption.
As an infant in the 1960s, Harness was adopted by a white couple and raised far from the rez, far from her birth community, and completely segregated from her cultural heritage. This story is about her weaving her way back home and making sense of her traumatic adoption.
As an adoptee myself I found her story gut wrenching and inspiring. Harness is a brilliant writer and a phenomenal woman. Her wisdom, authenticity, and strength reverberate through the pages of this beautiful memoir.
2019 High Plains Book Award (Creative Nonfiction and Indigenous Writer categories) 2021 Barbara Sudler Award from History Colorado
In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her "real" parents. He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born-except they hadn't, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later.
Pet names in romance can make or break a book, in my opinion. Sometimes, they can be offputting, but other times, pet names make me smile. They elevate the chemistry between characters–turn the heat up a notch on a steam scene, make you blush, and make you fall in love with the characters. When I read a pet name I can imagine the tone, level, and timbre. It makes me feel like I'm there in the pages with the characters. I think it's because a pet name or nickname is special. A person assigns it to you because they care–or, better yet, within the pages of a romance, they love.
This book sparked my love for Carian Cole's books, and I've one clicked on her books ever since.
This age-gap romance between Toren and Kenzi happened organically, and I loved watching their platonic love morph into romantic love. Tor’s pet name for Kenzi was Angel, which was fitting for the kind-hearted, strong heroine.
I think what most impacted me about the nickname was how it transformed throughout the book. At first, Angel was just a sweet endearment, but it matured as Kenzi did. Every time she worried about animals or showed concern for her dad, the nickname felt more and more fitting.
When I was five years old, I told Toren Grace we were going to get married someday. He'd been my closest friend, my protector, and my rock since the day I was born. But during my senior year, our relationship slowly changed. Silly conversations morphed into serious heart-to-hearts. Innocent friendship turned to stolen glances.
Then one day, an unexpected kiss changed everything.
While that kiss was all I'd ever dreamed of, it knocked Tor clear off his axis. His strong moral compass makes it impossible for him to accept our feelings for each other. Because, not only am I eighteen…
During my MFA, I learned to write family dramas and character-driven fiction, but I wanted more comfort, joy, and… romance! I knew the swoony and funny aspects of rom-coms could lift heavier emotional subjects like grief and loss, allowing readers to explore these resonant aspects of life safely, with a guaranteed Happily Ever After. All the books on this list explore a full emotional range of the human experience through extraordinary, utterly magical love stories about otherwise ordinary, flawed people. I hope they make you laugh, swoon, maybe shed a few cathartic tears, and come out the other side feeling better than when you turned the first page.
What’s better than a figure skating pair romance? One where the newly formed team are enemies! Jasmine has never reached the same elite level as Ivan, but now that she’s temporarily paired with him for one season, she’s determined to make the most of it, even if they spend their ice time bickering.
Jasmine has a supportive, close-knit family, but she’s not getting younger, and her divorced father pressures her to finally give up her skating aspirations and go to college. Jasmine is scrappy, snarky, and impossible not to root for. This slow-burn romance builds organically as Ivan’s arrogance quietly shifts to admiration for and loyalty to his new partner.
This book also has one of the swooniest micro trope moments: Ivan’s hidden feelings come out in an achingly sweet slip as he cares for Jasmine and calls her “baby.”
If someone were to ask Jasmine Santos to describe the last few years of her life with a single word, it would definitely be a four-letter one.After seventeen years—and countless broken bones and broken promises—she knows her window to compete in figure skating is coming to a close.But when the offer of a lifetime comes in from an arrogant idiot she’s spent the last decade dreaming about pushing in the way of a moving bus, Jasmine might have to reconsider everything.Including Ivan Lukov.
I’m passionate about this because I write romantasy too, and so do many other wonderful authors. Sarah J. Maas is a legend in the Romantasy genre, and she’s prolific, so there’s a lot to read with her various series. But, if you’ve finished with her books and are looking for more, there are plenty of authors out there doing amazing, spine-tingling, dare I say loin-tingling work, and we should celebrate them. Besides, no matter how prolific Ms. Maas is, readers will always finish books faster than even she can write them.
This book is on many folks’ Best of 2023 list, and for good reason. It’s romantic, funny, and irreverent. And Maehrer birthed it from a TikTok series of short videos. There’s nothing not to like here.
Evie Sage needs a job badly. Her family needs the money to eat, so it doesn’t matter what employment she finds, just as long as they pay her. A chance run-in with the town’s most Evil Villain ends in a job offer, and she takes it. It doesn’t hurt that he’s attractive, even if he runs a nefarious crime empire. (Insert evil laugh here.)
While drooling over her boss isn’t required, it’s sure fun. However, it all turns very serious when someone turns against the Villain and puts her job in jeopardy. Besides, she’s not certain who the real bad guys are.
The joy here is how the author turns the hero/villain trope on…
LIMITED FIRST PRINT RUN―featuring spray-painted edges, while supplies last in the US and Canada only.
Once Upon a Time meets The Office in Hannah Maehrer’s laugh-out-loud viral TikTok series turned novel, about the sunshine assistant to an Evil Villain…and their unexpected romance.
ASSISTANT WANTED: Notorious, high-ranking villain seeks loyal, levelheaded assistant for unspecified office duties, supporting staff for random mayhem and terror, and other Dark Things In General. Discretion a must. Excellent benefits.
With ailing family to support, Evie Sage's employment status isn't just important, it's vital. So when a mishap with Rennedawn’s most infamous Villain results in a job…
