The posthumous publishing history of Bessie Smith's short fiction is complicated. This 2011 AWS collection, The lovers, is a slightly revised edition of the collection of short pieces previously issued as Tales of Tenderness and Power in 1989: the pieces that were also in A woman alone have now been left out, and a few pieces not previously available in book form have been added, leaving us with twenty pieces in all, all from the last 20 or so years of her life.

About half the pieces in the book, including the title story, are short stories set in the same kind of Botswana village setting as Head's main novels; the remainder are essays or fables on political/historical themes, mostly dealing with the South African situation or with African colonialism more generally. "Son of the soil", a concise, hard-hitting ten-page summary of South African history and where it went wrong, is the piece that really stands out from this second group.

The village stories deal with similar themes to the novels When rain clouds gather and Maru: the difficulty of scraping a living from the arid land; the rigid traditionalism of village society with its unreasonable, damaging suspicion of everything and everyone that is strange and new; the exploitation of this by corrupt chiefs; and the strong affection that Head obviously had for the place and the people despite all those negative things. Sometimes she is also provoked to attack what she sees as Botswanan political smugness, the way people present their humiliating buffer-state condition as though it is a triumph of cunning diplomacy. But mostly, these are stories about people dealing with the challenges of ordinary life, things like hunger, sickness, wayward or violent spouses, rebellious children, or oppressive parents. The tone tends to be a bit less cool than in the novels: Head allows herself to show us her emotional engagement with her characters, and this brings out some very powerful and original writing. ( )