The Old Drift - Hardcover

"A rich, thick Zambian epic, The Old Drift blends real-life history with magical realism. . . . A striking debut."--USA Today (5 Books Not to Miss)

"In a novel that spans the breadth of Zambia's precolonial past to its digital future, Serpell's unbound imagination is often a thing of beauty. . . . It is in the familial space with its dramas of loves, betrayals, desires and dreams that [Serpell] excels. Her Zambian characters are especially brimming and compelling. In a nod to Leo Tolstoy, she eventually offers her readers a lovely kernel of an overarching theme that binds her characters across the passage of time and encapsulates her confident writing style: 'Every family is a war but some are more civil than others.'"--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"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."--The Washington Post

"Highly anticipated . . . a boldly sweeping epic . . . The singularly stunning achievement of [The Old Drift]: 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."--San Francisco Chronicle

"In this wonderfully chaotic epic, Namwali Serpell invites us into an indelible world that's part history, part sci-fi, totally political, and often as heartbreaking as it is weirdly hilarious."--The Boston Globe

"Serpell creates a stunning narrative that's voiced as forcefully by her characters as they are by a vociferous swarm of mosquitoes--yes, actual mosquitoes--exploding the dividing lines between categories to tell a new kind of story."--The Rumpus

"It's hard to believe this is a debut, so assured is its language, so ambitious its reach, and yet The Old Drift is indeed Namwali Serpell's first novel, and it signifies a great new voice in fiction. Feeling at once ancient and futuristic, The Old Drift is a genre-defying riotous work that spins a startling new creation myth for the African nation of Zambia. . . . Serpell's voice is lucid and brilliant, and it's one we can't wait to read more of in years to come."--Nylon, (50 Books You'll Want to Read in 2019)

"In turns 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, author of Her Body and Other Parties

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. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing. The Old Drift is her first novel.