Book Synopsis A dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage.-Salman Rushdie, The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Dwight Garner, The New York Times - The New York Times Book Review - Time - NPR - The Atlantic - BuzzFeed - Tordotcom - Kirkus Reviews - BookPage WINNER OF: The Arthur C. The Old Drift is her first novel.About the Book Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2019-Title page verso. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for her story 'The Sack'. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers in 2011. Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. 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 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. 'This mesmerizing début novel tells the history of Zambia through three families whose lives - and blood - commingle across more than a century. 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.

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

'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… dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage.' Salman Rushdie, New York Times Book Review 566pp., paperback, Reprint, London, (2019) 2020Īn epic novel about a cycle of retribution between three Zambian families.

The old drift book