Introduction

“A dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage.”—Salman Rushdie, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Clear-eyed, energetic and richly entertaining.”—The Washington Post
 
1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. 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 the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families (black, white, brown) as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond. As the generations pass, their lives—their triumphs, errors, losses and hopes—emerge through a panorama of history, fairytale, romance and science fiction.

From a woman covered with hair and another plagued with endless tears, to forbidden love affairs and fiery political ones, to homegrown technological marvels like Afronauts, microdrones and viral vaccines, this gripping, unforgettable novel is a testament to our yearning to create and cross borders, and a meditation on the slow, grand passage of time.
 
Praise for The Old Drift

“An intimate, brainy, gleaming epic . . . This is a dazzling book, as ambitious as any first novel published this decade.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
 
“A founding epic in the vein of Virgil’s Aeneid . . . 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.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
“A story that intertwines strangers into families, which we'll follow for a century, magic into everyday moments, and the story of a nation, Zambia.”—NPR

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of March 2019: Making good on the publisher’s claim of being "the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for," this ambitious novel follows three very different founding families across generations, from 19th-century Europe to the banks of the near-future Zambezi river. The first matriarch we meet is Silliba, illegitimate daughter of an Italian noble and his housecleaner, born covered in hair that regrows as fast as it is cut. Next is Agnes, a rising tennis star - until she loses her sight. She secretly flees her wealthy, British parents to return to the home of her Rhodesian lover...who notices small eyes growing on her that recede on closer inspection. We then meet Matha, a young African woman coming of age as Zambia becomes a nation in the 1960s. These intertwining stories are as steeped in a solemn strain of magical realism as they are in actual history: the plot’s fantastical elements reveal the cruelties and absurdities of real-world colonialism. Ultimately, this novel’s chief pleasure lies in watching wildly varying lives daub together to produce a cross-century portrait of a country. --Katy Ball, Amazon Book Review

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