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 talentWinner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2020'The great African novel of the twenty-first century' Tade Thompson, author of RosewaterOn 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

Long-listed for HWA Crowns 2019 (UK)

“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”

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 -- Salman Rushdie 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 -- Leaf Arbuthnot 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 -- Dwight Garner 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 -- Anthony Cummins Observer

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.

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