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
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.
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
*New York Times Book Review*
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
*Sunday Times*
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
*New York Times*
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
*Alice Sebold*
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
*Observer*
Brilliantly inventive
*Times Literary Supplement*
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
*Garth Greenwell*
A vast, ambitious and polyphonous debut novel by a writer whose
criticism and short stories I’ve admired for years
*Big Issue, *Books of the Year**
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.”
*New Yorker*
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