A sweeping, epoch-defining novel of three families who are plagued by a curse over the course of generations, following them from India, Italy and England until their tangled fates converge in Zambia
NAMWALI SERPELL is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Africa 39, a 2014 Hay Festival project to identify the best African writers under 40. Her first published story, 'Muzungu', was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2009 and shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize for African writing. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for her story 'The Sack'. The Old Drift is her first novel.
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*
an intimate, brainy, gleaming epic
*New York Times*
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
*Washington Post*
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!
*Alexandra Fuller*
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
*Carmen Maria Machado*
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
*San Francisco Chronicle*
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
*Wall Street Journal*
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
*Fiona McFarlane*
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
*Chika Unigwe*
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
*Chinelo Okparanta*
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
*Jennifer Makumbi*
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