The Old Drift

An electrifying debut from the winner of the 2015 Caine Prize for African writing, The Old Drift is the Great Zambian Novel you didn’t know you were waiting for and the launch of a thrilling new talent

Extraordinary, ambitious, evocative… The Old Drift is an impressive book, ranging skillfully between historical and science fiction, shifting gears between political argument, psychological realism and rich fabulism…a dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage

Brilliant...there are moments of such heart-wrenching poignancy that I had to put the book down several times and recompose myself. Serpell writes with the emotional maturity and sardonic smile of one who has lived several times already

An intimate, brainy, gleaming epic... The reader who picks up The Old Drift is likely to be more than simply impressed. This is a dazzling book, as ambitious as any first novel published this decade. It made the skin on the back of my neck prickle...she’s such a generous writer. The people and the ideas in The Old Drift, like dervishes, are set whirling

From the poetry and subtle humor constantly alive in its language, to the cast of fulsome characters that defy simple categorization, The Old Drift is a novel that satisfies on all levels. Namwali Serpell excels in creating portraits of resilience—each unique and often heartbreaking. In The Old Drift the individual struggle is cast against a world of shifting principles and politics, and Serpell captures the quicksand nature of a nation’s roiling change with exacting precision. My only regret is that once begun, I reached the end all too soon

An impressive first novel… The Old Drift is electric with the sense that Serpell is laying down pieces in a puzzle kept teasingly out of sight... A growing sense that The Old Drift could go on for ever is tribute to its inventiveness

It’s difficult to think of another novel that is at once so sweepingly ambitious and so intricately patterned, delivering the pleasures of saga and poetry in equal measure. The Old Drift is an endlessly innovative, voraciously brilliant book, and Namwali Serpell is among the most distinctive and exciting writers to emerge in years

A vast, ambitious and polyphonous debut novel by a writer whose criticism and short stories I’ve admired for years

The Old Drift is, to me, the great African novel of the twenty-first century. The scale, the characters, the polish and lyricism of the passages all conspire to tell an unforgettable tale. At last, a book that acknowledges that the African lives with the fantastic and mundane. At last, an African book of unarguable universality. Namwali Serpell has created something specifically Zambian and generally African at the same time. The Old Drift is everything fiction should be, and everything those of us who write should aspire to

Tade Thompson, chair of judges of the Arthur C. Clark Award 2020

This mesmerizing début novel tells the history of Zambia through three families whose lives—and blood—commingle across more than a century. The narrative is long and dense, but it rarely drags, thanks to Serpell’s eclectic blending of literary traditions, from the Victorian novel to magical realism and Afrofuturism. The revolving cast is full of striking characters... Serpell’s master storytelling may provide a remedy to a problem remarked on by one character: that “most Westerners don’t even know whereabouts in Africa we are.”

an intimate, brainy, gleaming epic

Namwali Serpell’s vibrant, intellectually rich debut novel, The Old Drift, is in keeping in that tradition, and like any good nation-hoovering novel, it too refuses to conform to expectations… This oddball cast of characters simply represents the joys of the picaresque novel, in which the author’s set design is intentionally surreal and ironic… Serpell is a natural social novelist, capable of conjuring a Dickensian range of characters with a painterly eye for detail

An astonishing novel, a riot for the senses, filled with the music and scents and sensations of Zambia. Namwali Serpell writes about people, land and longing with such compassionate humour and precision, there’s an old wisdom in these pages. In short, make room on your shelf next to a few of your other favourites: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tsisi Dangarembga and Edwidge Danticat jump to mind. It’s brilliant. This woman was born to write!

In turn charming, heartbreaking, and breathtaking, The Old Drift is a staggeringly ambitious, genre-busting multigenerational saga with moxie for days... I wanted it to go on forever. A worthy heir to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

Stunning...grappling with grandiose, complex notions, funneled through a kind of worldly knowledge and historical curiosity — all of which is ultimately grounded in an attention to the interiors of individual lives... Serpell’s vision has made The Old Drift among the most buzzed-about books of the year. It is perhaps not enough to say that the novel is audacious for being a debut in the form of a near 600-page multigenerational epic...the work is already being compared to both canonical and modern classics — Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

This is a founding epic in the vein of Virgil’s Aeneid, which provides the book’s epigraph, though in its sprawling size, its flavor of picaresque comedy and its fusion of family lore with national politics it more resembles Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

The Old Drift is a stunning achievement: a novel of epic scope and powerful vision that also manages to be intimate, tender, and very funny. A truly important debut from a brilliant new voice

The Old Drift is an extraordinary meditation on identity, the history of a nation, love, politics, family, friendship and life. Serpell's prose is dazzling. Darting back and forth through the decades and mixing different genres, Namwali has delivered an original, remarkable, magical work that both delights and challenges

The Old Drift is a dazzling genre-bender of a novel, an astonishing historical and futuristic feat, a page-turner with a plot that consistently and cleverly upends itself. Playfully poetic and outright serious at once, it is one of the most intelligent debuts I’ve read this year. No matter your reading preference, there’s something in it for you

If, as she writes, "history is the annals of the bully on the playground" then in The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell wreaks havoc on the Zambian annals by rewriting the past, creating a new present, and conjuring an alternative future. In refusing to be bound by genre, Serpell is audacious and shrewd. This is a Zambian history of pain and exploitation, trial and error, and hope and triumph

A rambunctious epic… Serpell is an ambitious and talented writer, with the chutzpah to work on a huge canvas…a writer to watch

Monumental and powerful... The Old Drift is a novel that will leave you reeling and picking apart its many ideas, leaving almost no concept unexplored – whether that’s colonialism, capitalism, racial identity, political identity, climate change or government surveillance... Its ultimate hook though is Serpell’s awe-inspiring deftness at jumping from one location, time and character to the next, and fixing you firmly in each and every one. It’s a decidedly impressive debut

Namwali Serpell’s electric debut novel The Old Drift is richly satisfying in its storytelling and ambition… Sweeping but also playful, Serpell as a major talent

Financial Times, *Summer book 2019: critics' pick'

One of my favourite books for many, many years, it's complex and beautiful

Full of magic, history, and humor, The Old Drift will be unlike anything you’ve ever read

Serpell expertly weaves in a preponderance of themes, issues, and history, including Zambia’s independence, the AIDS epidemic, white supremacy, patriarchy, familial legacy, and the infinite variations of lust and love. Recalling the work of Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez as a sometimes magical, sometimes horrifically real portrait of a place, Serpell’s novel goes into the future of the 2020s, when the various plot threads come together in a startling conclusion. Intricately imagined, brilliantly constructed, and staggering in its scope, this is an astonishing novel

Namwali Serpell’s spellbinding debut is worth the investment

The Old Drift is an astounding novel… inventive and powerful–it is also surprisingly funny and plays brilliantly with language… beautiful, rewarding and thought-provoking

An original, poetic novel from an already award-winning writer is one of the year’s most anticipated debuts

An impressive book that demands your attention, and rewards your commitment with a beautifully told, richly evocative tale

Comparisons with Gabriel García Márquez are inevitable and likely warranted. But this novel's generous spirit, sensory richness, and visionary heft make it almost unique among magical realist epics

A mastery of language, a deftness in description, and a dip into surrealist and speculative elements makes The Old Drift a worthwhile study in holding together several storylines through the characterization of those searching for their calling, and the cost of those pursuits

This inventive first novel by Serpell, a Caine Prize winner, spans two centuries in Zambian history, mixing styles from Gothic to Afrofuturist

I recommend Namwali Serpell's 2019 Zambian tour de force The Old Drift. This is a long book – all 563 pages of it – by a writer whose prose and outsize imagination will hold you spellbound throughout

A tremendous novel, completely hypnotising

I loved Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift, a shimmering, shape-shifting epic of Zambia written over twenty years

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. She has received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Los Angeles Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; it was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her short story, 'Take It', was a finalist for the 2020 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. She is a Professor of English at Harvard.

**Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2020** 
 
 'The great African novel of the twenty-first century' Tade Thompson, author of Rosewater 
 
 On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there was once a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. 
 
 In 1904, in a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles his fate with those of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. 
 
 So begins a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. 
 
 'Extraordinary, ambitious, evocative, dazzling' Salman Rushdie 
 
 'Brilliant . . . heartbreaking' Sunday Times 
 
 'Charming, heartbreaking and breathtaking' Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

On Morrison

Immense gratitude for this book, and for Namwali Serpell's close looking, which has led to these stunning reconsiderations of Morrison, which are incisive, tender, and also honest and unsparing. This is a book that rises to the challenge of extending and expanding a legacy by giving the person at the heart of that legacy time, rigor, and care

HANIF ABDURRAQIB, author of A Little Devil in America

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Furrows, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and selected as one of The New York Times’s Ten Best Books of the Year. Her book of criticism, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a professor of English at Harvard University.

A giant in American letters, and one of our most beloved writers, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison has inspired generations. 
 
But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Serpell puts it, ‘she is our only truly canonical black, female writer—and her work is complex.’ In On Morrison, Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and a professor of literature at Harvard University, to illuminate Morrison’s masterful experiments with literary form. 
 
This is Morrison as you’ve never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre—her fiction, poetry, dramatic works, and criticism—with contextual guidance, archival discoveries, and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant black American authors of all time, but also on how to read great works of literature. 
 
Stylish, edifying, and electrifying in its intelligence, this dialogue on the page between two artist-readers is literary criticism at its very best.

Namwali Serpell

Serpell is a terrific destabiliser, even at the level of the sentence... There are no tidy moral lessons at the end of her dissonant and time-contorting fable - no bones to bury, no truth to pin, no mysteries solved - only the inescapable rhythms of loss

A masterfully intelligent and many-sided book

The Furrows...confirms Serpell's place as one of the most innovative and intelligent writers today

In Namwali Serpell's hands, grief is a kind of possession. The Furrows is a piercing, sharply written novel about the conjuring power of loss

Masterful: a blend of self-knowing, sincere and spry... Serpell's sentences are unhurried, yet detailed, smart and brisk

Namwali Serpell's deep unity of imagery and voice is at the employ of a wild talent for narrative pivot and surprise; what seems at first a meditation on family trauma unfolds through the urgency of an amnesiac puzzle-thriller, then a violently compelling love story. The final pages take flight with visionary intensity. The Furrows is a genuine tour de force

Who could have imagined that a novel about loss and long grieving could be so soaring, so sexy, so luminously beautiful and poetic, such a rich and shimmeringly scored piece for three voices?... We are lucky to have this alive, exhilarating novel remind us how inexhaustible and surprising the form is and continues to be

Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others

What makes The Furrows so thrilling is its ability to constantly surprise and keep us on the edge of our seats. But its real brilliance rests in Namwali Serpell's bold and audacious refusal to allow the complicated layers of guilt and grief to remain unexplored. In this spectacular and genre-bending book, she has permanently shifted the ground beneath us, and where we stand by the end is in a new place where mourning and longing and sensuality not only exist at once, but transform into something revelatory, and perhaps even healing

Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King

The furrows of grief, in Namwali Serpells's telling, are a surreal and hypnotic fantasy. This book reads like a ghost story, a murder mystery, a thriller, a redemptive love story that never loses its knife edge of danger. A daring and masterful book about how we respond to the mystery of death

Kiran Desai, author of The Inheritance of Loss

Namwali Serpell has written a stunning and highly original novel exploring the erotic shadow-life of grief. In Serpell's hands, longing becomes a story of uncanny repetition, and the logic of dreams feels intensely, compellingly real

Beautifully written... it blew me away

Namwali Serpell's gift soars...She takes pain and loss and cooks up a storm. Currents of grief, guilt and greed are unpicked with ruthless precision. . . The Furrows establishes her as a literary powerhouse

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, author of The First Woman

Grief is dogged company. It shapeshifts and proliferates, hijacking thoughts and ravaging sleep. But Namwali Serpell's riveting prose urges me to believe that sometimes the true work of grief is to rupture us so thoroughly, we become capable of telling--and living--another story

Tracy K. Smith, poet and author of Ordinary Light

The Furrows is a deeply felt novel that deserves to be read. So eloquent and assured that I easily fell into this sweeping, gut-wrenching tale of loss, grief, and identity

Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun

Brilliant... A heart-racing, heart-wrenching stunner that sizzles, with complex questions floating under the thrilling story. This is a novel not to be missed

Nafissa Thompson-Spires, author of Heads of the Colored People

The Furrows is a triumph, a book that succeeds brilliantly in reconfiguring and retuning itself in pursuit of its essential subject. In this novel of grief, time flows, stretches, collapses, bends, stutters, and echoes, responsive, as it must be, to loss. Namwali Serpell narrates with an acute awareness of what resists and eludes conventional narration, producing a story that is wonderfully unpredictable, arresting, haunting

If The Old Drift was an epic effort to outdo Marquez and Rushdie, this slippery yet admirably controlled novel aspires to outdo Toni Morrison, and it earns the comparison. It's deeply worthy of rereading and debate. Stylistically refreshing and emotionally intense, cementing Serpell's place among the best writers going

[Serpell captures] the child's-eye perspective with great flair...along with the secrecy and judgement of the adult world

An endlessly innovative and deeply moving exploration of grief and family

From the Prize-winning author of The Old Drift

A powerful new novel about grief and mourning from the acclaimed and prize-winning author of The Old Drift 
 
A BARACK OBAMA BOOK OF THE YEAR and NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt. 
 
Cassandra is twelve; her little brother Wayne is seven. One day, when they're alone together, there's an accident and Wayne is lost forever. Though his body is never recovered, their mother can't stop searching. 
 
As Cassandra grows older, she sees her brother everywhere: in cafes, aeroplane aisles, subway cars. But it can't be, of course. Or can it? And then one day, there's another accident, and she meets a man both mysterious and familiar, a man who shares her brother's name and who is also searching for someone... 
 
 
'In Namwali Serpell's hands, grief is a kind of possession. The Furrows is a piercing, sharply written novel about the conjuring power of loss' - RAVEN LEILANI, author of Luster

Namwali Serpell

Praise for The Furrows

Serpell is a terrific destabiliser, even at the level of the sentence... There are no tidy moral lessons at the end of her dissonant and time-contorting fable - no bones to bury, no truth to pin ...

A masterfully intelligent and many-sided book

The Furrows...confirms Serpell's place as one of the most innovative and intelligent writers today

Serpell is a terrific destabiliser, even at the level of the sentence... There are no tidy moral lessons at the end of her dissonant and time-contorting fable - no bones to bury, no truth to pin ...

A masterfully intelligent and many-sided book

The Furrows...confirms Serpell's place as one of the most innovative and intelligent writers today

Serpell is a terrific destabiliser, even at the level of the sentence... There are no tidy moral lessons at the end of her dissonant and time-contorting fable - no bones to bury, no truth to pin ...

A masterfully intelligent and many-sided book

The Furrows...confirms Serpell's place as one of the most innovative and intelligent writers today

Books by Namwali Serpell

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