“In the brilliant and impressionistic latest from Serpell (The Old Drift), a young woman traverses the trenches of grief that have shaped her life. . . . In a breathtaking maneuver, Serpell resets the novel again and again, cycling through possible accidents that convey Cassandra’s shock . . . In a series of shocking twists, Serpell shatters comfortable ideas about grief and melds Cassandra’s glittering narrative shards into a searching, unforgettable story. It’s a considerable shift from the huge canvas of her previous work, and no less captivating.”—★ Publishers Weekly, starred

“[T]he storytelling is engrossing on the plot level, featuring terrorist attacks, homelessness, identity theft, racial code-switching (Cassandra’s mother is White and her father, Black), seduction—all of which Serpell is expert at capturing. But each drama she describes also speaks to the trauma Cassandra suffers, which makes the novel engrossing on a psychological level as well…. If The Old Drift was an epic effort to outdo Marquez and Rushdie, this slippery yet admirably controlled novel aspires to outdo Toni Morrison, and it earns the comparison. It’s deeply worthy of rereading and debate. Stylistically refreshing and emotionally intense, cementing Serpell’s place among the best writers going.”—★ Kirkus Reviews, starred

“[M]esmerizing and endlessly thought-provoking... Despite the story’s blurred but precisely chiseled layers of reality, The Furrows remains focused.... her purposely disconcerting second novel will reinforce readers’ appreciation of her daring experimentation and keen talent.... Turbulent, poetic and haunting, The Furrows is a stellar achievement.”—★ Book Page, starred

“Grief is dogged company. It shapeshifts and proliferates, hijacking thoughts and ravaging sleep. But Namwali Serpell's riveting prose urges me to believe that sometimes the true work of grief is to rupture us so thoroughly, we become capable of telling—and living—another story.” —TRACY K. SMITH, author of Life on Mars

“The furrows of grief, in Namwali Serpell's telling, are a surreal and hypnotic fantasy. This book reads like a ghost story, a murder mystery, a thriller, a redemptive love story that never loses its knife edge of danger. A daring and masterful book about how we respond to the mystery of death.”—KIRAN DESAI, author of The Inheritance of Loss

“In Namwali Serpell’s hands, grief is a kind of possession. The Furrows is a piercing, sharply written novel about the conjuring power of loss.”—RAVEN LEILANI, author of Luster

“Namwali Serpell’s deep unity of imagery and voice is at the employ of a wild talent for narrative pivot and surprise; what seems at first a meditation on family trauma unfolds through the urgency of an amnesiac puzzle-thriller, then a violently compelling love story. The final pages take flight with visionary intensity. The Furrows is a genuine tour de force.”—JONATHAN LETHEM, author of Fortress of Solitude

“Who could have imagined that a novel about loss and long grieving could be so soaring, so sexy, so luminously beautiful and poetic, such a rich and shimmeringly scored piece for three voices?”—NEEL MUKHERJEE, author of The Lives of Others

“Serpell’s gift soars in The Furrows. Currents of grief, guilt and greed are unpicked with ruthless precision. Serpell’s ability to read life, her sharp observation and wit, in The Furrows establish her as a literary powerhouse.” —JENNIFER NANSUBUGA MAKUMBI, author of Kintu

“A heart-racing and heart-wrenching stunner with prose that stuns and sizzles on the page and complex questions floating under the thrilling story. As brilliant as its author, this novel is not to be missed.” —NAFISSA THOMPSON-SPIRES, author of Heads of the Colored People

“Beautifully written… the innovative representation of grief blew me away.” —ZOË WICOMB, author of David’s Story

“Namwali Serpell has written a stunning and highly original novel exploring the erotic shadow-life of grief. In Serpell’s hands, longing becomes a story of uncanny repetition, and the logic of dreams feels intensely, compellingly real.”—ISABELLA HAMAD, author of The Parisian

“What makes The Furrows so thrilling is its ability to … keep us on the edge of our seats. But its real brilliance rests in Namwali Serpell’s bold and audacious refusal to allow the complicated layers of guilt and grief to remain unexplored. In this spectacular and genre-bending book, she has permanently shifted the ground beneath us, and where we stand by the end is in a new place where mourning and longing and sensuality not only exist at once, but transform into something revelatory, and perhaps even healing.”—MAAZA MENGISTE, author of The Shadow King

“So eloquent and assured that I easily fell into this sweeping, gut-wrenching tale of loss, grief, and identity.”—NICOLE DENNIS-BENN, author of Here Comes the Sun

“The Furrows is a triumph, a book that succeeds brilliantly in reconfiguring and retuning itself in pursuit of its essential subject. In this novel of grief, time flows, stretches, collapses, bends, stutters, and echoes, responsive, as it must be, to loss. Namwali Serpell narrates with an acute awareness of what resists and eludes conventional narration, producing a story that is wonderfully unpredictable, arresting, haunting.”—JAMEL BRINKLEY, author of A Lucky Man

“A scholar as well as fiction writer, Serpell (The Old Drift) is one of the best thinkers around. Her new novel invites us to think about grief and love and mystery, about family and what happens after a devastating loss.”—Boston Globe, “The 20 New Books We’re Most Excited to Read this Fall”

“The fluctuating but omnipresent nature of grief and the unreliability of memory inform Namwali Serpell’s affecting new novel, The Furrows…. With warmth and dexterity, Serpell has crafted a narrative that underscores how loss can show us the depths of our love.”—Time, “The 33 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2022”

“An undulating, enthralling tale of death and rebirth—the rebirth, that is, of those who survive a loved one…. An unexpected perspective and plot twist near the halfway point reinvigorate the story with fresh tension and direction, with Serpell utterly unafraid to fuse and forge genres, turning up the levels of suspense, mystery, and even romance.”—AV Club, “10 Books You Should Read in September”

“Serpell’s second novel opens with a tragedy, and the trauma and grief unfold like a dream. . . . The whole thing is a gorgeous, surreal meditation on identity and mourning, one that squeezes the heartstrings and rarely relaxes its grip.”—Vulture, “49 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2022”

“[A] wrenching examination of grief, memory, and reality…. Let this breathtaking novel roll over you in waves.”—Esquire, “The 20 Best Books of Fall 2022”

“Employing language in creative ways and upending reader expectations, Serpell continues to expand the possibilities of what literature can accomplish.”—Booklist

INTERVIEWS AND PROFILES

ONE of the New York Times’ 10 BEST BOOKS and 100 Notable Books of 2022 AND…

President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2022. A finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction. Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.

One of Time Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2022. The Washington Post’s 50 Best Fiction Books of 2022. Oprah Magazine’s Favorite Novels of 2022. The Guardian’s Best Fiction of 2022. New York Magazine’s Best Books of 2022. L.A. Times 5 Best Novels. Vox’s 16 Best Books of 2022. Kirkus’s 100 Best Fiction Books of 2022. BookPage’s Best Fiction of 2022.

Selected for the L.A. Review of Books Fall Book Club. On “best of” and “most anticipated” fall books lists in Time, AV Club, The Boston Globe, Esquire, Vulture, Harper’s Bazaar, Kirkus, The L.A. Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The New York Observer, The Millions, Ms., People, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Lit Hub (see aggregated list)… Reviews of the novel here.

“Namwali Serpell’s new novel reinvents the elegy…. The Furrows enacts the physics of becoming lost…. The novel’s engine is epistemic as well as emotional, Serpell being one of those novelists who have metabolized the quirks and the canniness of literary theory…. Though the novel’s story lines turn and twist, the precision of Serpell’s language remains under exquisite control…. a novel that reclaims and refashions the genre of the elegy, charging it with as much eros as pathos.”—The New Yorker

“The novel is most interested in the riddle of grief: What happens to us—where do we go—when someone we love dies? And how do we make it back?…. Grief, too, can seem unreasonable, and The Furrows captures its brain-scrambling, time-altering power…. Much of the book feels painfully, tragically accurate…. ‘The best kind of tale tells you you in the end, unveils the unsolvable riddle,’ Serpell writes in The Old Drift. Her new novel is that type of story. Its whirl of ambiguities and enigmas add up to not more eddying confusions, but to a stark reminder that the only reasonable response to grief is ‘life life life.’”—The Washington Post

“The Furrows... is a further testament to Serpell’s abilities and alacrity as an artist.... Serpell’s dexterity not only inside of sentences but inside the world, delivering just enough immutable truth to guide the reader along the wobbly tightrope, gives her that much more freedom to move balletically through different registers of feeling, space and time.... If The Old Drift put Serpell in conversation with Rushdie and García Márquez, The Furrows seems to stand on the shoulders of Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison. Above all, Serpell is working with a confidence in and commitment to her project and to the story form. She understands what it is to always have hold of the reader. She does not pander or explain. Instead, the genius is in the book’s bones, its DNA…. Serpell gives exactly… a stunningly acute depiction of how the endless layers of both grief and absence, the impossibly slippery act of trying to be a person, feel.”—L.A. Times

“To furrow is to fold two paths into each other until they are one; in other words, to furrow is to accept fate. This is precisely the premise of Namwali Serpell’s provocative second novel.... A seemingly simple premise, Serpell’s expert use of repetition makes the plot feel dynamic and unpredictable. . . . The sort of grief Serpell depicts is complicated and unruly, which makes it feel tangibly real.... The Furrows is, overall, a triumph. Serpell’s deft prose and languid narration come through beautifully throughout the novel. Every once in a while, a passage is so visceral it leaves the reader breathless.... If grief is, as Serpell suggests, the expansive wave between another’s death and our own, perhaps it is a fortuitous privilege to know what’s waiting for us on the shore.”—New York Magazine

“With its scrutiny of doubles, of doppelgängers, of déjà vu, of parallel existences, of the transmigration of souls, of hints of incest, of shifting points of view, the book is a mind-twist.... There are many other things on this novel’s mind. Serpell intelligently appraises race and class.... This novel has a refrain: ‘I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.’ This is, I think, Serpell’s way of saying that while life is what happens to you, art is how you understand it, and sometimes that art takes unusual forms.”—The New York Times

“[A] bravura investigation of grief…. Serpell’s premise is a magnificent snare; you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better opening chapter this year…. The Furrows is… intimate, a novel of skin pressed to skin…. a modern parable, or sociopolitical trauma made flesh. Told once, the story of Wayne’s accident is a tragedy; but told again and again and again it becomes a kind of elegy, a lament for broken Black bodies, and recurrent horrors. Serpell is a terrific destabiliser, even at the level of the sentence…. There are no tidy moral lessons at the end of her dissonant and time-contorting fable—no bones to bury, no truth to pin, no mysteries solved—only the inescapable rhythms of loss.”—The Observer

“Is this the best novel about grief this year?…. [It’s] masterful: a blend of the self-knowing, sincere and spry…. Serpell’s sentences are unhurried, yet detailed, smart and brisk—two cigarette-tips ‘kiss and smolder’; life underwater is ‘the color of shadow’—while her narrative is coolly controlled, cradling Cassandra’s emotions as they unpick and reverse themselves…. A masterfully intelligent and many-sided book.”—The Telegraph

“[A] sinuous new novel… a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma…. Details shatter like glass and then reassemble, but with key pieces of the puzzle in place…. The Furrows is an English major’s dream date: Serpell taps influences across genres, from Virginia Woolf to Dashiell Hammett to Toni Morrison. Above all, the novel’s a valentine to cinema, and particularly to the oeuvre of Alfred Hitchcock…. She delivers on the daring promise of her prize-winning début… while teasing out a jazzier, more intimate register, casting a spell that probes the fluid, disorienting flow of grief.”—The Star Tribune

“Each of the narratives Cee crafts about her brother, Wayne, his death, and disappearance, sends readers drifting further away from the facts-of-the-matter and deeper into the jagged contours of her pain…. [Serpell is] challenging readers to rearrange our ethical and emotional expectations for the novel. Admittedly, I expected and desired Serpell’s new fiction to work the same groove she dug with The Old Drift. But The Furrows— speculative, strange, and ambitious—has forcefully destabilized that desire and folded me into its wide open, ravenous black heart.”—The Boston Globe

“The Furrows . . . confirms Serpell’s place as one of the most innovative and intelligent writers today. . . . It is in dwelling on the aftermath, and not the accident itself, that The Furrows comes alive—shifting and undoing our understanding of grief. ‘What hand has reached in and turned the world over?’ Cee wonders towards the end of the novel. In telling this story, Serpell too has reached in and turned the world over.”—The Financial Times

“The Furrows is strangely unclassifiable. In addition to being an elegy, it’s also a mystery novel, a psychological thriller and a portrait of a family falling to pieces… The first half of the novel is pure poetry and emotion… The second half… is a plot-driven thriller, providing more questions than answers. As jarring as this shift in tone and style is, it’s also exciting. Just when you think you know where Serpell is going, she takes you down a different path. Highly recommended.”—Readings

“Serpell’s intense, palimpsestic antinovel, The Furrows, may best be read, then, as an intensification of the uncertain narrative, in which we come to understand that (a), (b), and (c) are equally and confoundingly true, or that it doesn’t matter which we settle on in the face of penetrating grief. Such uncertainty is a key to the book’s ingenious, off-kilter necromancy. The Furrows relies on three voices to bring us into an exquisitely rendered nether space.... The more we read, the more we are strung along by competing sequences bound by Serpell’s sleek and unexpected syntax, her unnerving emotional observation and repeated images.... Serpell opts for stunning emotional deepenings at every turn. Again and again, the novel exploits the literary potential of the Freudian uncanny to construct haunting multiplications rather than the transparent resolutions of traditional novelists.”—Alta

“The writer’s voice is distinctly her own: lyrical, daring, assured…. [An] intricate, genre-bending novel…. Enthralling… Serpell disrupts our expectations, over and over… [and] blurs the line between our dreams and our waking lives.”—Oprah Daily, cover reveal

“This knottily brilliant puzzle box of a novel… is an aching, stylistically innovative portrait of grief, memory, and familial fracture that is already earning its author comparisons to Toni Morrison…. A surreal, sensual, and often thrilling examination of childhood trauma and its devastating ripple effects, this is a novel destined to end up on every Best of the Year list.”—Lit Hub, “22 Novels You need to Read This Fall”

BOOK CLUB KIT

 

Cassandra is twelve; her little brother Wayne is seven. One day, when they’re alone together, there’s an accident, and Wayne is lost forever. Though his body is never recovered, their mother can’t stop searching. The missing boy cleaves the family with doubt: How do you grieve an absence? And how does it feel?

As C grows older, she relives and retells her story, and she sees her brother everywhere: in cafes, airplane aisles, subway cars. Here is her brother’s older face, the light in his eyes, his lanky limbs, the way he seems to recognize her, too. But it can’t be, of course. Or can it? And then one day, there’s another accident, and C meets a man both mysterious and familiar, a man who’s also searching for someone, as well as his own place in the world. His name is Wayne.

Namwali Serpell’s piercing new novel captures the ongoing and uncanny experience of grief, as the past breaks over the present, like waves in the sea. The Furrows is a bold exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a masterful story of mistaken identity, slippery reality, black experience, and the wishful and sometimes willful longing for reunion with those we’ve lost.

 

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. Here begins the epic story of a small African nation, told by a mysterious swarm-like chorus that calls itself man’s greatest nemesis. 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. This error sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between these three Zambian families, as they continually collide over the course of the century, into the present, and beyond. 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 – THE OLD DRIFT is a gripping, unforgettable debut novel.

THE OLD DRIFT: BOOK TOUR MEDIA COVERAGE

Praise for the old Drift

“Serpell’s debut is a rich, complex saga of three intertwined families over the course of more than a century.... Recalling the work of Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez as a sometimes magical, sometimes horrifically real portrait of a place, Serpell’s novel goes into the future of the 2020s, when the various plot threads come together in a startling conclusion. Intricately imagined, brilliantly constructed, and staggering in its scope, this is an astonishing novel.” — ★ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ★

 “The past, present, and future of an African nation is filtered with humane wit, vibrant rhetoric, and relentless ingenuity through the interweaving sagas of three very different families…. Comparisons with Gabriel García Márquez are inevitable and likely warranted. But this novel’s generous spirit, sensory richness, and visionary heft make it almost unique among magical realist epics.” — ★ KIRKUS REVIEWS ★

“In this smartly composed epic, magical realism and science fiction interweave with authentic history, and the ‘colour bar,’ the importance of female education, and the consequences of technological change figure strongly. It’s also a unique immigration story showing how people from elsewhere are enfolded into the country’s fabric… Serpell’s novel is absorbing, occasionally strange, and entrenched in Zambian culture—in all, an unforgettable original.” — ★ BOOKLIST ★

“Three multicultural families’ pasts and presents, told by a swarming chorus of voices, culminate in a tale as mysterious as it is timeless.... This stunning cross-genre debut draws on Zambian history and... reinforces the far-flung exploration of humanity.” — ★ LIBRARY JOURNAL ★

“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 & Other Parties

 “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, author of The Lovely Bones

 “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 humor and precision, there’s an old wisdom in these pages. In short, make room on your shelf next to a few of your other favorites: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Edwidge Danticat jump to mind. It’s brilliant. This woman was born to write!” —ALEXANDRA FULLER, author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight

“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, author of Under the Udala Trees

“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, author of What Belongs to You

 “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 NANSUBUGA MAKUMBI, author of Kintu

 “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, author of On Black Sisters’ Street and Night Dancer

“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, author of The Night Guest and The High Places

“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.” —SALMAN RUSHDIE, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (cover)

“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.” —DWIGHT GARNER, THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Namwali Serpell’s vibrant, intellectually rich debut novel, The Old Drift… 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. . . . [A] clear-eyed, energetic and richly entertaining novel.” —THE WASHINGTON POST

“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. It is the reader’s great privilege to follow her strange and vivid characters from cradle to grave.” —THE SUNDAY TIMES

“Namwali Serpell's lush, sprawling new novel is a speculative history — and future — of Zambia…. To err also means to wander, and The Old Drift does, shamelessly: It does not acknowledge restraints of species or time or perspective or taste or page length. Like a mosquito swarm, the narrative hovers, drifts, and returns elliptically… sweeping in scope and gesture…. Serpell also performs exquisite acts of literary ventriloquism.” —NPR

“A heartbreaking epic of staggering creativity. 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

“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.’” —THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“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.” —THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“Namwali Serpell’s impressive first novel is an indulgent, centuries-spanning slab of life marbled with subplots, zigzagging between characters and decades to play snakes and ladders with the bloodlines of three Zambian families with roots from around the world.” —THE OBSERVER

“This ambitious first novel has the chutzpah to work on a vast canvas, extending from colonial times to Afrofuturism… Serpell is a writer to watch.” —THE GUARDIAN

“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 she 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.’” —THE MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE

“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." —NYLON MAGAZINE

“Serpell’s command of the minutia of sentence craft, and her ability to balance that craft against this novel’s massive historical scale is thrilling. The Old Drift feels like entering a wormhole, where time is both slow enough for us to note the way a woman’s dress knocks a wine glass off balance as she walks by, and vast enough that we may see exactly how feeble, how ultimately incidental to human history, nations are.” —INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS, THE BELIEVER

The book I wish I’d written... This changes by the week, month, day. Right now, it’s Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, her debut novel and a sprawling lifeforce, a history of Zambia partly told by mosquitos. —ALI SMITH, THE GUARDIAN (2019)