The Lovers

‘My writing is not on anybody’s bandwagon. It is on the sidelines where I can more or less think things out with a clear head.’ – Bessie Head (1975)

The Lovers collects together her short fiction of the 1960s and the 70s, written mainly in Serowe, Botswana, and depicting the lives and loves of African village people pre- and post-independence. An earlier selection called Tales of Tenderness and Power was published in the Heinemann African Writers Series in 1990, while this replacement volume adds many previously unavailable stories collected here for the first time. Anthology favourites like her breakthrough ‘The Woman from America’ and ‘The Prisoner Who Wore Glasses’ are included, leading up to the complete text of her much-translated title story.