A love Story is a first person narrative story of beautiful sensitive and intelligent Doreen Seko, later Mrs. Doreen Patrick, her brother Godbless, other siblings Alfred and Samson and their peasant mother, Foibe Seko. Doreen comes of age in women headed household within a rural setting. She is socialized into heavily gendered requirements of that setting, is educated and finally gets married. In marriage the patriarchal order informs every aspect of her married life. She meets Joseph Selese, a rich and fulfilled career diplomat. The encounter highlights the lesson that any asymmetrical system has its implosive potentialities, irrespective of the player’s own The novel belongs to a new generation of works which are documenting ,for the first time ,the constitution and emergence of historical, political and cultural consciousness hitherto not considered the domain or concern of writing outside the industrialized world. I think the gender politics of Parched Earth with its emphasis on complementarity rather than either fatality or separatism places it with a new generation of theoretical work by African women positing a local rather than western oriented brand of womanist/feminist/women identified consciousness. Fwazia Mustafa Associate Professor, Comparative Literature, Fordham University. New York Parched Earth is a narrative about responses of female characters to the masculine world, colored with situations full of feminine insights. This is a female character as an appendage of the masculine world. Seity C.S.L. Chachage Associate Professor, Sociology, University of Dar es Salaam.