The Old Drift

<p><b>Namwali Serpell</b> 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 <i>The Old Drift</i> won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction and the<i> Los Angeles Times'</i> Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; it was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the<i> New York Times Book Review</i> and one of <i>Time </i>Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her nonfiction book <i>Stranger Faces</i> was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her short story 'Take It' was a finalist for the 2020 <i>Sunday Times</i> Audible Short Story Award. She is a Professor of English at Harvard.</p> <p><b>**Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2020**</b><br><br> <b>'The great African novel of the twenty-first century' Tade Thompson author of <i>Rosewater<br> </i></b><br> On the banks of the Zambezi River a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls there was once a colonial settlement called The Old Drift.<br><br> 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.<br><br> 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.<br><br> <b>'Extraordinary ambitious evocative dazzling' Salman Rushdie</b><br><br> <b>'Brilliant . . . heartbreaking' <i>Sunday Times</i></b><br> <b><br> 'Charming heartbreaking and breathtaking' Carmen Maria Machado author of <i>In the Dream House</i></b></p> <b>Extraordinary ambitious evocative</b>… <i>The Old Drift</i> is an impressive book ranging skillfully between historical and science fiction shifting gears between political argument psychological realism and rich fabulism…<b>a dazzling debut establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage</b> <b>Brilliant...there are moments of such heart-wrenching poignancy that I had to put the book down several times and recompose myself</b>. Serpell writes with the emotional maturity and sardonic smile of one who has lived several times already An intimate brainy gleaming epic... The reader who picks up <i>The Old Drift</i> is likely to be more than simply impressed. <b>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</b>...she’s such a generous writer. The people and the ideas in <i>The Old Drift</i> like dervishes are set whirling From the poetry and subtle humor constantly alive in its language to the cast of fulsome characters that defy simple categorization <b><i>The Old Drift</i> is a novel that satisfies on all levels</b>. Namwali Serpell excels in creating portraits of resilience—each unique and often heartbreaking. In <i>The Old Drift</i> the individual struggle is cast against a world of shifting principles and politics and <b>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</b> <b>An impressive first novel</b>… <i>The Old Drift</i> is electric with the sense that Serpell is laying down pieces in a puzzle kept teasingly out of sight... <b>A growing sense that <i>The Old Drift</i> could go on for ever is tribute to its inventiveness</b> <p><b>**Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2020**</b><br><br> <b>'The great African novel of the twenty-first century' Tade Thompson author of <i>Rosewater<br> </i></b><br> On the banks of the Zambezi River a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls there was once a colonial settlement called The Old Drift.<br><br> 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.<br><br> 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.<br><br> <b>'Extraordinary ambitious evocative dazzling' Salman Rushdie</b><br><br> <b>'Brilliant . . . heartbreaking' <i>Sunday Times</i></b><br> <b><br> 'Charming heartbreaking and breathtaking' Carmen Maria Machado author of <i>In the Dream House</i></b></p>