Call and Response

Call and Response is a beautifully observed collection set mainly in Serowe and Gaborone, Botswana. The stories follow daughters, sisters, wives, and friends as they navigate coming-of-age, caretaking, migration, grief, and the ordinary theater of family life. A teenager sneaks to a wedding while her mother tends a dying sister. A younger sibling grows up to confront adult betrayal—and her own desires. A young widow wrestles with tradition as her mourning year ends. A returnee from America tries to restart her life while reckoning with friendship and class. An older woman, rooted in a once-glamorous neighborhood, faces the ache of time. Three sisters figure out what to do with their aging mother. A wife reads the sky—and her heart—as her husband heads to the cattlepost. A boy is raised by a formidable grandmother and learns how history and power settle in a person’s life. A private-school teen renames herself and tests the edge of first love. Moeng’s voice is warm, unsentimental, and cinematic. The places feel lived-in, the people complicated and real. These stories talk to one another, to the past, and to us.

• Listeners who love character‑driven fiction rich with place and family dynamics
• Fans of linked short stories about girlhood, caretaking, grief, and migration
• Readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yaa Gyasi, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Namwali Serpell

Gothataone Moeng is a fiction writer from Serowe, Botswana. A former Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, she holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi. Her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, One Story, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Call and Response is her debut collection. She lives between Botswana and the United States.