The Furrows

byNamwali Serpell

From the Prize-winning author of The Old Drift

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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

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

Beejay Silcox, The Guardian

About Namwali Serpell

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.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • ISBN: 9781529115550
  • Length: 288 pages
  • Dimensions: 198mm x 18mm x 129mm
  • Weight: 204g
  • Price: £9.99
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